* This text was reproduced and reformatted from the text available at the Chinese Government’s Official Web Portal: (visited August 17, 2009) <http://www.gov.cn/english/official/2009-04/13/content_1284128.htm.

1 Ariana Eunjung Cha, China Tells U.N. Panel that It Respects Rights, WASH. POST, Feb. 10, 2009, at A12.

2 Created in March of 2006 to replace the former Commission on Human Rights, the HRC is an inter-governmental body within the UN system consisting of forty-seven States and tasked with strengthening promotion and protection of human rights around the globe. Office of the UN High Commission on Human Rights, The Human Rights Council, <http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/> (last visited June 16, 2009). China and three other countries accused of serious human rights violations, namely, Cuba, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, are members of this Council. The U.S. was elected into the Council this year. See Edith M. Lederer, U.S. Wins First Seat on U.N. Rights Council, Assoc. Press, May 12, 2009, available at < http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/12/us-wins-first-seat-on-un_n_202197.html.

3 Cha, supra note 1.

4 See id

5 To facilitate readability and downloading in one single document, the Chinese government should convert this report to pdf format.

6 For a refresher on the Chinese governmental system, see, e.g., MICHAEL J. SODARO, COMPARATIVE POLITICS: A GLOBAL INTRODUCTION 662-65 (3d ed. 2008); Rolf H.W. Theen & Frank L. Wilson, COMPARATIVE POLITICS: AN INTRODUCTION TO SEVEN COUNTRIES 441-52 (3d ed. 1996). The introduction to the document indicates the plan was produced by a “joint meeting mechanism” which, besides the Information Office of the State Council, consisted of fifty-two other organizations, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, many other government departments, and arms of civil society like China Disabled Persons’ Federation and China Society for Human Rights Studies.

7 I hereinafter refer to these rights as “socioeconomic rights.”

8 I hereinafter refer to these rights as “political-civil rights.”

9 The actual phrase used in the plan was “guarantee of the rights and interests of ethnic minorities, women, children, elderly people and the disabled.”

10 For a listing of internationally recognized human rights, collected in the international bill of human rights and made up of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, see Jack DONNELLY, INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS 6 (1998). The author identifies thirty-eight of these rights.

11 One could argue that some of the rights included were perhaps designed to correct practices over which the HRC, two months before, in the course of its review of Beijing’s human rights record, took Chinese officials to task.

12 As indicated before, in the post-Mao period, Chinese leaders have promoted economic reform (mixing central planning with market incentives) while putting a lid on political reform. Some Western scholars doubt that this strategy will succeed in the long-term. See, e.g., Theen & Wilson, supra note 6, at 450-51. Professors Theen and Wilson contend that although “[t]he institutions that were designed to create the appearance or facade of democracy have changed little or not at all in form. . .their content is different.” Id. at 451.

13 Dingding Chen, Explaining China’s Changing Discourse on Human Rights, 1978-2004, 29 ASIAN PERSP. 155, 173 (2005).

14 Dingding Chen, Understanding China’s Human Rights Policy: The Limits of International Norms, 1 CHINESE DIMENSION 1, 6, available at <http://cosa.uchicago.edu/dingdingchen3.htm (last visited June 3, 2009) (citing the language of Chinese President Jiang Zeming in his political report to the Fifteenth Communist Party Congress in 1997).

15 The introduction to the document was replete with a commentary on the peculiarities of China to justify accordance of primary to socioeconomic rights. These “realities”include China’s status as a “developing country” with a vast population of 1.3 billion people, an “underdeveloped productivity,” an “unbalanced economic and cultural development,” stability, and “influences and limitations of nature.” Most instructive for us here is the enumeration of the imperatives to “accelerat[ e] socialist modernization.”

16 See Ethan Cole, China Debuts First Human Rights Action Plan, CHRISTIANPOST, Apr. 15, 2009, at Christianpost<http://www.com/article/20090415/china-debuts-first-humanrights-action-plan/index.html (last visited June. 23, 2009).

17 See Mary Ann Glendon et al., Comparative Legal Traditions: Text, Materials and Cases 31-32, 672-714 (1985).

18 Id. at 32.

19 One of the most memorable definitions of human rights is by the Chinese dissident, Wei Jingsheng, who defined these guarantees as “rights with which every person is born,” “independent of the will of the government and even . . . of all mankind[,]” and that are not “luxuries or hobbies[,]” partly because “[t]hey concern the destiny and future of humankind.” Wei Jingsheng, Human Rights: Not Merely an Internal Affair, in Realizing Human Rights: Moving from Inspiration to Impact 42, 43, 46 (Samantha Power & Graham Allison, eds., 2000). Wei wrote that human rights issues “have to do with how to protect the relatively weak rights of individuals from the relatively strong organs of power. They are objective standards that apply equally to all governments and all individuals, and no one is entitled to special standards. Like objective existence and objective laws, they are objective truths.” Id. at 42.

20 Chen, supra note 13, at 162-63.

21 Id. at 164.

22 Id.

23 Id. at 167.

24 Before 1971, Taiwan held the Chinese seat in the UN The Chinese island became the power base for nationalists chased out of power by the communists in 1949.

25 See Chen, supra note 13, at 164-68.

26 See id. at 174-75.

27 Id. at 165, 180.

28 See Theen & Wilson, supra note 6, at 430-31. See also CHARLES H. BLAKE, POLITICS IN LATIN AMERICA 262 (2d ed. 2008) (taking a global perspective on “Economic Reform under Communist Rule”). For a socialist society steeped in the sermon of egalitarianism, a hallmark of this new orientation was Deng Xiaoping’s slogan that ‘to get rich is glorious” (cited in Chen, supra note 13, at 164).

29 Andrew J. Nathan, Human Rights in Chinese Foreign Policy, 139 China Q. 624 (1994). The logic behind this right, the Chinese leadership rationalized in a 2005 statement, is that

30 Chen, supra note 13, at 179.

31 Id.

32 For an exposition on this topic, see Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (2004).

33 Chen, supra note 13, at 179. Arguably, what can be more indicative of China’s new confidence as an emerging great 845 power and Beijing’s readiness to use human rights as “soft power” than the fact that China produces its own record to counter or blunt U.S. criticisms of Chinese practices in the annual report on human rights practices published by the State Department. See, e.g., RICHARD B. LILLICH ET AL., INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS: PROBLEMS OF LAW, POLICY, AND PRACTICE 1119-1124 (4th ed. 2006). Incidentally, the same Information Office of the State Council, which released the document here under review, also published the human rights record on U.S. practices.

34 See Chen, supra note 14, at 2-8 (documenting the “empirical evidence” of these accomplishments). See also Chen, supra note 13, at 168-73 (characterizing the period 1989-1997, based on the human rights events that occurred during this period, as one involving a ‘consolidation of human-rights discourse,” and the period 1997-2004, as one involving “internalization of human-rights disc”urse”); ANN KENT, CHINA, THE UNITED NATIONS, AND HUMAN RIGHTS: THE LIMITS OF COMPLIANCE (1999) (detailing the history of China’s participation in UN activities since 1949).

35 See § V(1) (summarizing China’s activities regarding the fulfillment of its international human rights obligations) and § V(2) (detailing its exchanges and cooperation in human rights, including its work on the UN Human Rights Council and other UN organizations).

36 Chen, supra note 14, at 6 (quoting the report of President Jiang Zeming in his political report to the Fifteenth Communist Party Congress). Chen observed that this is the first time that the CCP has included the rule of law and the protection of human rights in its development strategy. Id.

37 See China Ratifies Key U.N. Human Rights Treaty, Assoc. Press, June 19, 2001, at <http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001-02-28-china.htm (last visited My. 30, 2009). China ratified the treaty with a reservation regarding the right of workers to form unions. As for the distinction between the two processes, signature is a prelude to ratification that impels an obligation on the signatory “not to defeat the object and purpose of a treaty prior to its entry into force.” Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties art. 18, 2255 U.N.T.S. 331, 8 I.L.M. 679 (May 23, 1969). A signatory becomes a party to a treaty only after it has ratified that treaty.

38 But the Chinese leadership appears to drag its feet in ratifying the ICCPR, an occurrence that evidences a disinclination to extend to political-civil rights the same primacy it accords to socioeconomic rights. The government announced in 2006 that it plans to amend its Criminal, Civil, and Administrative Procedure Laws and reform the judiciary to lay the ground for ratification. Jiefen Li, Human Rights vs State Interests in China: Case Studies, 9 N. ZEALAND J. OF ASIAN STUD. 147, 149 (Dec. 2007). Three years later, as indicated in the plan under review, China is still “prepar[ing] the ground” for ratifying this instrument.

39 Cited in Chen, supra note 13, at 172. This expression by Li Peng, chair of the National People’s Congress, China’s national legislature, was embodied in a congratulatory message to mark the launching of Human Rights, a bimonthly and the first journal on human rights issues to be published in China. Id.

40 Cited in id.

41 Some of China’s putative human rights accomplishments, like the White Paper on Human Rights in the wake of crackdown on Tiananmen Square were, in actuality, an attempt to put a good face on violations. For example, part of the purpose of the White Paper was to “help the international community understand the human rights situation as it is in China.” Id. at 176.

42 For an argument along these lines, see, e.g., Rosemary Foot, Rights Beyond Borders: The Global Community and the Struggle over Human Rights in China (2000).

43 See, e.g., Kent, supra note 34, at 230.

44 See generally Jingsheng, supra note 19, at 39-47.

45 See id. at 42.

46 See Mark Weston Janis, International Law 4 (5th ed. 2008).

47 For an eloquent argument of this position, see Chen, supra note 13, at 155-82; and Chen, supra note 14, at 1-12.

48 Chen, supra note 13, at 174. As Chen remarked, in the post- Mao period, from 1978 on, “the CPP started engaging in selfcriticism by critically examining its own policies over the previous thirty-seven years since the founding of the [People’s Republic of China].” Id. at 174-75.

49 Andrew Lui, Human Rights, Constitutionalism and Comparative Foreign Policy: An Analytical Framework for Canada, the United States and China 14 (paper presented at the International Studies Association’s 49^th Annual Convention, Mar. 26, 2008), available at < http://http://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2008/Lui.pdf (last visited June 2, 2009).