Fast-paced commercials for consumer goods from limousines to shampoo work viewers into a lather, only for the aspirational bubble to be burst by a series of dull government-dictated news reports.

Welcome to China in 2005, a country that allows a boisterous market economy while denying its citizens freedom of expression and a series of other fundamental political and civil rights.

As developing countries like China pursue economic growth at breakneck speed, it is often taken for granted that human rights take a back seat -- that there will be no gain without pain.

But some observers are increasingly bringing into question whether such a trade-off is inevitable, or indeed necessary.

On her first official visit to China, Louise Arbour, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, argued passionately against assuming a direct causal link from oppression to social stability and economic growth.

"I certainly believe very firmly that social stability is best ensured by having a legal framework that is respectful of individual rights," she told a briefing in Beijing last week at the end of a five-day visit.

A legal framework was needed that "provides on the economic and social side an equitable access to prosperity, and on the civil and political side a fair participatory voice by all in their own government", she said.

The second half of this argument flies in the face of what a succession of authoritarian governments in China and elsewhere in Asia have been saying -- and doing -- for decades.

In regional capitals from Seoul in the 1960s to Beijing today, the official dogma has been that economic and social rights, such as the right to eat one's fill, are paramount.

Political and civil rights, like the right to form trade unions, would lead to instability and hamper economic growth, according to this argument.

China is one of the most avid proponents of the view and can draw on two millennia of political practice, based on a tradition for laws scaring subjects into submission by their sheer severity.

To people like Arbour, this is both ethically, and factually, wrong.

"Law, contrary often to popular thinking, in my view, is not about coercion, it's about compliance, and compliance comes from trust and from fairness," she told the briefing.

-- Evidence far from clear-cut --

Governments such as that of Singapore may say that the past decades of unprecedented prosperity only became possible because of tight political controls.

But the evidence accumulated over the years in Asia is far from clear-cut, argues Joanne Bauer, director of studies at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs in New York.

"What we're seeing in Singapore is a very robust economy and a continuing clamp-down on civil and political rights, whereas in Taiwan what we're seeing is high economic growth and an increasingly open and democratic society," she says.

Some economists and political scientists argue nations such as South Korea and Singapore became rich because their authoritarian governments happened to implement a series of sound economic policies.

It was because the governments invested heavily in education and infrastructure, not because they locked up dissidents, that they were able to turn themselves into tiger economies, they say.

"There was an export-led growth policy at the right time," says Bauer. "I don't think there's any evidence at all that clamping down on civil and political rights, preventing labor unions from speaking out, and people from organizing enabled a country like South Korea to grow."

Even so, many observers find it hard to ignore the growth-promoting aspects of a closed political system.

After all, China's economy increased by an average of 10.2 percent a year in the 1990s, as opposed to the "Hindu rate of growth" of 5.5 percent in neighboring democratic India, according to World Bank figures.

One reason why China is currently so popular among foreign investors is the ban on independent labor unions, ensuring a stable business climate, says Daniel Bell, a professor of philosophy at Beijing's Tsinghua University.

"If there were more political rights, including the right to form labor unions, for example, then it would probably reduce foreign investment and make economic growth more difficult at this point," he says.

"I'm not justifying it, I'm just describing the situation as foreign investors see it," Bell adds.

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