Beijing report praises human rights progress

Without any warning that a white paper would be coming, China’s cabinet, the State Council, issued a fiercely upbeat government report yesterday, saying the country was making great progress on human rights.

While China's human-rights record is regularly criticised by the European Union and Washington, as well as by organisations such as Amnesty International, Front Line Defenders and the Committee to Protect Journalists, the white paper issued in Beijing said China was doing very well both at home and internationally.

“The basic rights of the Chinese people became better protected, and China’s constitutional principle of ‘respecting and safeguarding human rights’ was implemented in a better way,” the white paper said.

It stated that “the fundamental purposes of the blueprint are to protect civic rights, to defend human dignity and to put basic human rights into practice”.

Hefty

The document weighed in at a hefty 21,000 characters in nine chapters; the English version of the report is about 14,000 words long.

“The tremendous achievements China has made in its human-rights endeavours fully demonstrate that it is taking the correct path of human-rights development that suits its national conditions,” it said.

China argues that its focus on human rights is aimed at protecting the greater good and boosting economic development, and that introducing greater freedoms for the individual, such as freedom of the press, ending censorship, and other areas, are still a work in progress.

The report said that the government had made particular advances in bringing greater transparency to the legal system, in making the judicial system more impartial and in increasing the emphasis on the “rule of law”.

Measures introduced

Zhu Liyu, deputy director of the Centre for Human Rights Studies at the People’s University of China, told the Xinhua news agency that a number of new measures had been introduced to improve administrative power and protect civic rights.

“In the cases that a person’s rights are violated by administrative power, the judicial system will be the last resort. Without the legal system, it is impossible to actually protect human rights,” Mr Zhu said.

However, critics say that the law serves the interests of the ruling Communist Party, and believe that human rights have become significantly worse since President Xi Jinping began his crackdown on dissent and press freedom.

Among those imprisoned for dissent in China are Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo. The white paper said that one of the ways that it had managed to protect the people's cultural rights was boosting TV, film and cartoon production.

It pointed out that in 2014 China produced 429 TV series, totalling 15,983 episodes, and TV cartoon programmes totalling 138,496 minutes.

It produced 618 feature films and 140 other films, including popular science films, documentaries, animated cartoons and special-purpose films.

Total cinema box-office receipts reached 29.6 billion yuan (€4.25 billion), an increase of 36 per cent over the previous year.