The Chinese word 人权 (rénquán), meaning "human rights", is a modern conceptual compound formed by combining the character 人 (rén), meaning "person" or "human", with 权 (quán), meaning "right", "power", or "authority". It is a semantic compound where the two morphemes directly contribute to the meaning: "human" + "rights". This specific term was coined in the late 19th or early 20th century as a direct translation and conceptual borrowing from Western political philosophy (e.g., the Japanese term jinken, which uses the same characters, or the English "human rights"), representing a new lexical formation to express an imported socio-political concept that did not have a direct, equivalent single term in classical Chinese discourse.