Human rights in China

“Reports for China invariably start with a description of the nature of the political regime, as if that were the most significant determinant for rights in the country. For example the 2004 US state department report on China begins: “The PRC is an authoritarian state in which… the Chinese Communist Party is the paramount source of power.” Imagine if it began instead: “Human rights and other indicators of well-being across the board are highly correlated with wealth. China outperforms the average country in its lower-middle income category on every major indicator except civi and political rights (as is generally true for other East Asian countries).”

Randall Peerenboom “Assessing Human Rights in China: Why the Double Standard?” 2005, Cornell International Law Journal

“He goes on to point out that rule of law, good governance, and the codification of most rights (including civil and political rights) correlate to relatively high levels of wealth. Thus a comparison of China to the developed world unsurprisingly reveals that the former has more departures from the rule of law, weaker state institutions, more corruption and fewer individual freedoms than their western counterparts. He offers a variety of explanations for his view that the comparison is unfair and that China is held to higher (or even double standard) standards than other lower-middle-income countries. Among these are that the Western-dominated international human-rights community is biased towards democracies that promote liberal, civil, and political rights, holding nondemocratic countries to the same standards despite their differing needs and values.

China is also singled out because of its potential threat to US domination: Beijing’s growing economic and geopolitical muscle is seen to pose a normative challenge tot he liberal human-rights regime insofar as China’s elites could deploy it to defend and advance rights-based policies and ideals that clash with those of the West, predicted as they are on secular liberalism. The idea that US hegemony might be challenged by Beijing reduces some commentators to near-apoplexy”.” 

From China’s New role in Africa, Ian Taylor. 

 

Non-interference

Interference