For a Life of Contentment

Chapter I

The Basics: Rights to Subsistence, Development, Dignity and Happiness

The Communist Party of China and the Chinese government have included respecting and protecting human rights as a key part of national governance, and thanks to this, China's human rights cause has delivered historic achievement.

"In the past, many people lived their whole lives without a single good day." Chu Chengming, an elderly farmer living in the Dabie Mountains, said emotionally as he browsed through his family tree.

According to the genealogical records, his grandfather raised 10 children, of whom five died young. His father was born shortly after Aisin-Gioro Puyi, the last emperor of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), ascended the throne, and died in the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression in 1944 at the age of just 36. His mother died at 47.

The record of this ordinary family is the epitome of modern China's reality — people suffering from war, poverty and diseases, with no protection whatsoever for human rights. When the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, the average life expectancy in the country was less than 35 years old.

In today's China, the lack of food, clothing and medical services is long gone. Since the beginning of the reform and opening up drive more than 40 years ago, the per capita disposable income in China has increased by more than 180 times. Some 770 million rural Chinese have been lifted out of poverty and live a moderately prosperous life. The average life expectancy has risen to 78.2 years. [State Council Information Office: White paper titled "China's Epic Journey from Poverty to Prosperity," September 2021]

Under the leadership of the CPC, the fate of countless people has been changed. A new chapter has been written in the history of China's human rights by the earth-shaking changes in the Chinese society, and the country has seen achievement in the human rights cause on all fronts. China deems the rights to subsistence and development as the primary basic human rights. The CPC is an active promoter and staunch defender of the human rights cause, and has always included respecting and protecting human rights as a key part of national governance. The country has formulated and implemented national human rights action plans and other special plans, to promote human rights development through protection, and to advance the human rights cause through development. It made step-by-step achievements of raising the living standards of its people from poverty to bare subsistence, from moderate prosperity in general to moderate prosperity in all aspects. The country has embarked on a journey of pursuing a higher goal of common prosperity, and is committed to providing a happy and dignified life for some one fifth of the world's population.

1.1 Removing the "biggest obstacle to human rights" for 1.4 billion people

Mass poverty on an enormous scale was once the biggest obstacle in China's human rights cause. Before the launch of reform and opening up, nearly 800 million people were impoverished, unable to meet their basic living needs.

By 2012, there were still 98.99 million people living in poverty in China. China made a nationwide effort to promote "targeted poverty alleviation," so that the remaining poor population could access sufficient food and clothing, while their other basic human rights such as compulsory education, basic medical care and housing security, were also promoted and protected.

By the end of 2020, after more than 30 years of fighting poverty, the largest and strongest such campaign in human history, China had lifted over 770 million rural poor out of poverty.[State Council Information Office: White paper titled "Poverty Alleviation: China's Experience and Contribution," April 2021.] The country met the poverty eradication target of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development 10 years ahead of schedule. With the highest number of people lifted out of poverty, China has contributed to over 70 percent of global poverty reduction.

From being regarded as "a talking tool" to becoming "a person with dignity," 80-year-old Losang Droma from the Khesum Community in the city of Shannan, Tibet Autonomous Region, has witnessed profound life changes: before the abolition of serfdom in 1959, she worked in the slave owner's manor all year round without any income, and she was not treated as a person of dignity. Now, together with all Chinese people, she is living a moderately prosperous life. While enjoying her retirement, she said, "only those who live well and happily can have dignity."

1.2 Promoting "holistic human rights" in a coordinated way

Every kind of human rights is interrelated and mutually reinforcing. By safeguarding people's rights to subsistence and development and promoting the comprehensive and coordinated development of economic, social and cultural rights as well as the civil and political rights of its citizens, China has advanced the cause of human rights with a holistic approach.

It is China's consistent value to put the people and their lives first and to protect people's right to life and health. Since the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, China has spared no effort to save every infected patient. From a 30-hour-old baby to the elderly of over 100 years old, every life has been protected with the utmost effort. In the face of the constantly mutating virus, China has carried out scientific prevention and control of the epidemic based on its own national conditions, constantly adjusted prevention and control measures in response to the changing situation, effectively coordinated epidemic prevention and control with economic and social development, and protected people's lives and health to the greatest extent.

The effective protection of economic, social and cultural rights such as the right to education, work and social security has changed the fortunes of countless Chinese people. In 1975, Yang Desen, then aged 18, was working in a small village 200 kilometers from his home. Two years later, he took the college entrance examination and is now a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a well-known underwater acoustic scientist. Yang Desen is just one of millions of examples of people changing their lives through education.

Women and children are key groups in the protection of human rights. The Marriage Law, the first piece of legislation promulgated by the People's Republic of China, explicitly abolished arranged marriage and enshrined freedom of marriage and gender equality. Women's rights are strictly protected in China. The average life expectancy of Chinese women currently exceeds 80 years, while women account for more than half of higher education students and take up over 40 percent of the jobs in the country. In the city of Lijiang in Yunnan Province, Zhang Guimei, who runs the Huaping Senior High School for Girls, has helped more than 1,800 rural girls over the past ten years to realize their college dreams.

Based on its own national conditions, China has constantly developed its whole-process people's democracy, and improved the system of institutions through which the people exercise their role as masters of the country. The country established the system of people's congresses, the system of CPC-led multiparty cooperation and political consultation, the system of regional ethnic autonomy and the system of community-level self-governance, laying a solid institutional foundation for the people to enjoy broader, fuller and more comprehensive democratic rights.

China now has 492,000 villagers' committees and 116,000 residents' committees, covering all residents in both urban and rural areas. In the latest elections for grassroots self-governing organizations completed in 2021, hundreds of millions of people voted and elected nearly 2.8 million members of the committees of local villagers and residents. Gao Jianzhong, head of the villager's committee of Guojiahuochang Village in Yulin city, Shaanxi Province, said the extent of how much people now cherish democratic rights was beyond imagination. "Many villagers came back from hundreds of kilometers away to cast their solemn votes."

China has also promoted legal protection for human rights and safeguarded social equity and justice. It has formulated and improved a series of legal systems to protect human rights, strengthened law-based governance, sped up the building of a law-based government that the people are satisfied with, deepened reform of the judicial system, fully implemented the judicial responsibility system, resolutely redressed and prevented wrongful convictions and false charges, enhanced people's awareness of the need to respect, study and abide by the law and their ability to apply the law, and striven to respect and protect human rights in the whole process of legislation, law enforcement, administration of justice and observance of the law. From 2016 to 2020, courts across the country retried 8,310 criminal cases in accordance with trial supervision procedures, and overthrew the original judgments.[State Council Information Office: Briefing on the Implementation Results of the National Human Rights Action Plan of China (2016-2020), May 31, 2021]

With the development of the economy and society and the progress of science and technology, the content of human rights has been constantly enriched. The right to privacy was clearly defined in China's first Civil Code, which took effect in 2021. China also promulgated the Law on Protection of Personal Information, which effectively guarantees citizens' privacy. In addition, China has promulgated the Cybersecurity Law and other laws to restrict the collection of consumers' personal information by mobile apps, effectively safeguarding citizens' legitimate rights and interests in cyberspace.

The Human Development Index (HDI), created by the United Nations Development Programme by integrating basic indicators such as life expectancy, education level and quality of life, is a credible proof of human rights progress. Thanks to the improvement of "holistic human rights," China's HDI rose from 0.499 in 1990 to 0.761 in 2019, ascending from the ranks of countries with low HDI scores to the ranks of those with high HDI scores.

1.3 Promoting high standards of "equal human rights"

Although China has finished building a moderately prosperous society in all respects and become the world's second-largest economy, "unbalanced and inadequate" development is still a salient challenge the country faces. In the pursuit of fairer and more comprehensive protection of human rights, China upholds the "bottom-line guarantee" of ensuring basic living standards, and at the same time pursues the "high-line goal" of common prosperity, striving to strike a balance between fairness and efficiency in economic development.

China has built the world's largest social security network, which covers nearly all aspects of people's daily lives. It is a system for ensuring people's well-being that can provide inclusive public services, meet essential needs and ensure basic living standards. "We've got medical insurance, and we have pension after turning 60," said Li Dongfang, a farmer whose family has lived on the banks of the Yellow River on the Loess Plateau for generations.

China's protection of human rights is not just paying lip service, but implemented through concrete actions. By alleviating poverty, renovating dilapidated houses, constructing roads and bridges, and building drinking water projects, China has effectively improved people's living standards. Take environmental rights, which are crucial to the survival and health of its people, as another example. China upholds the basic national policy of environmental protection, follows the path of sustainable development, and includes the right to the environment in its national human rights action plan. In the 10 years since 2012, China's forest area has increased from 208 million hectares to 223.6 million hectares, ranking first in the world in planted forest area.

China's ongoing practice of common prosperity is the pursuit of a higher level of human rights protection, which will further improve people's lives, narrow the gap between the rich and the poor, and enable all people to share the benefits of development.

1.4 Fully participating in global human rights governance

While advancing its human rights cause at home, China also actively fulfills its responsibilities as a big country, by vigorously promoting the common values of peace, development, fairness, justice, democracy and freedom, by engaging deeply in UN human rights affairs, and by extensively carrying out international human rights cooperation, thus continuously promoting global human rights governance and effectively promoting international human rights development and progress.

China has successively ratified or acceded to more than 30 international human rights instruments, including six core UN conventions. It has provided assistance to 166 countries and international organization, and sent over 600,000 people on aid missions. It has also canceled matured government interest-free debts owed by heavily indebted poor countries, and least-developed countries on several occasions. China ranks first among the permanent members of the UN Security Council in terms of the number of peacekeepers dispatched, having sent more than 50,000 personnel on peacekeeping missions over the last three decades. The Belt and Road Initiative has become a new international public good that supports the development of all countries and is well received by the world. According to a World Bank report, the initiative could contribute to lifting 7.6 million people from extreme poverty and 32 million from moderate poverty. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, China has made great efforts to promote fair and reasonable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines around the world, and has become the country providing the largest number of vaccines to the rest of the world.

In terms of global poverty relief, China has actively assisted developing countries in seeking ways to shake off poverty and achieve development. Among these efforts, the Juncao technology project, which uses grass instead of wood to cultivate edible fungi, is an exemplary model in South-South cooperation. Over two decades ago, China launched the Juncao assistance project in Papua New Guinea. So far, the technology has taken root in more than 100 countries. In Kigali, capital of Rwanda, Emmanuel Ahimana learned to apply Juncao technology to grow mushrooms and has now been handsomely rewarded.

In the meantime, China also actively shares its experience in poverty alleviation with the world. In September 2020, Huishui County, southwest China's Guizhou Province, hosted a livestream discussion with over 200 politicians from 16 Latin American countries, and shared its experience of how local farmers had shaken off poverty by growing chayote.

The vision of "a community of shared future for mankind" put forward by China has been written into the resolutions of the UN General Assembly, the UN Security Council and the UN Human Rights Council on multiple occasions. A series of propositions put forth by China, including the concept of "promoting human rights through development," have been introduced into the sphere of international human rights. China also facilitated the formulation of a number of important documents on human rights, such as the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). The country has continuously offered the world Chinese wisdom and solutions to promote the global cause of human rights.