Coordinating human rights development(2)

The consciousness of human rights has been intensified throughout society.

After the concept of "human rights" was written into the Constitution, the idea to "respect and protect human rights" has been included into important documents such as the Constitution of the Communist Party of China, becoming an important principle and basic guideline for the CPC and the Chinese government to rule the country. China has worked out two "National Human Rights Action Plans," and the second Action Plan (2012-15) is being carried out in a good order. Various tasks and particular index are being effectively implemented. The popularization and specialization of human rights education have made new progresses, and five more famous universities have been named as "national human rights education and training bases." Now, centers for human rights education have been set up in tens of universities and colleges in China, and have been active in doing work on human rights training.

China has actively taken part in international exchanges and cooperation on human rights.

China has been active in taking part in the UN's multilateral human rights meetings, participating in review and discussion concerning the subject of human rights. Since 2013, China has smoothly gone through the second universal periodic review of the UN Human Rights Council, and most countries attending the conference have sufficiently confirmed the progress that China had made in its cause of human rights, supporting China in promoting and protecting human rights in accordance to its own national situation. In 2013, China was elected a member state of the UN Human Rights Council from 2014-16 by huge votes. Now, China has dialogs and discussion about human rights with nearly 20 countries each year, improving the understanding between each other.

China's development and prosperity have not only brought better development to its own cause of human rights, but made contributions to the cause of human rights in the world.

According to statistics made by authoritative institutions, in 2013, China's contribution rate for world economic growth was nearly 30 percent, and China has become one of the major engines to push forward world economic growth. For recent years, China has taken various forms of assistance to support and assist other developing countries, especially the most underdeveloped countries in the fields of poverty reduction, grain security, trading development, crisis prevention and reconstruction, population development, women and children's healthcare, the prevention and control of diseases, education, environmental protection, and so on. This year, in the face of Ebola virus disease in western Africa, China has sent several groups of experts in public health to countries which suffer most, including Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, and provided a large number of emergency humanity materials to help the local people preventing and controlling the plague. Since its first participation in the UN peacekeeping operations in 1990, China has taken part in 24 such activities of the UN, and dispatched more 25,000 person-time peacekeeping personnel in total. Hence, China has sent more engineering, transportation and medical units than any other countries which have sent troops for the UN peacekeeping operations, and also the developing country that pays more apportioned peacekeeping funds.

After exploration and efforts for years, China has successfully found a road of human rights development suitable to its own national situation. Summarizing the practice of human rights in China, we come to a few ideas as the following:

Firstly, the principle of universality of human rights should be combined with the particular situation of a certain country. The world develops multi-dimensionally, and there is no universal mode of human rights. The Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action passed by the world conference on human rights in 1993 points out, "the significance of national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds must be borne in mind." Likewise, ancient Chinese people said, "while oranges are grown south of the Huaihe River, they produce oranges, but when they are planted north of the river, they yield trifoliate oranges instead." Different people and countries have different understanding and requirements of human rights, and the problems that they face and need to solve first are not all the same, either. China is a large developing country with a population over 1.3 billion, the human rights development of China has been synchronous with its economic and social development all the time, and economic development and people's livelihood improvement have always been the crux of all the problems. That is the fundamental reason why China has taken the rights to existence and development as the primary human rights.