In China, human rights are anchored in the constitution.
But Beijing understands something else by the term - such as lifting millions out of poverty.
There is no freedom of expression.
In 2004, human rights were incorporated into the Chinese constitution - 55 years after the founding of the People's Republic of China.
Nevertheless, Beijing is repeatedly accused of violating the individual rights of the Chinese.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) defends itself against these allegations and emphasizes that the rights of every individual must always be weighed against the common good.
This interpretation of human rights is also anchored in Chinese law: Violations of individual human rights are legitimate if they serve the common good.
China's press and internet censorship, the execution of the death penalty and the possibility of arbitrary detention are widely criticized by Western states and international human rights organizations.
China often describes the accusations made by the West as a hypocritical attempt by the West to weaken the country politically.
For Beijing, human rights are one of China's "internal affairs" in which no one has to interfere.
Human Rights in China: History and Understanding in the People's Republic of China
The Communist Party (CCP) has ruled the People's Republic of China since the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949.
In the one-party state there is no separation of powers as in democratic systems.
The Chinese people therefore have no say in the country's politics.
In 2004 - 55 years after the establishment of the Chinese state - human rights were incorporated into the constitution.
However, the government in Beijing reserved an addition to the relevant article: It was stipulated that the state respects and guarantees human rights.
This gives the CCP the power to interpret how it interprets the relevant laws.
The meaning of human rights as understood by the United Nations and their interpretation by the CCP are fundamentally different.
While the universal human rights of the UN secure the basic rights and the human dignity of each individual, in the People's Republic the population as a whole has priority over the individual's rights of freedom: the common good is above the individual good.
The UN, on the other hand, with its agreements primarily aims to protect individuals from attacks by the state.
There are two of these agreements (UN Covenants), which together with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) form the international Bill of Rights.
The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), signed by China and ratified in 2001, deals, among other things, with the right to housing, education, work and health.
China counts these aspects as human rights and always emphasizes that it has made great strides in human rights through its successful fight against poverty and compulsory schooling.
In the Western understanding, human rights are primarily represented by political freedoms: freedom of expression, assembly and freedom of the press.
In these areas, China sets strict limits on freedom.
In 1998, however, China signed the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which deals precisely with these rights.
However, it has not ratified this pact to this day, despite promises to the contrary.
Despite the widespread criticism of the human rights situation in China, the country has already been selected several times by the UN General Assembly for membership in the UN Human Rights Council, most recently in October 2020.
Human rights in China: death penalty, forced confessions and administrative detention
In particular because of its draconian criminal law, the People's Republic of China has long been accused of systematic violations of human rights.
The death penalty is still regularly imposed, although it is unclear how many executions are carried out each year.
Not only extreme violent crimes are punished with death, but also bribery and drug trafficking.
The number of death sentences was reduced in 2011 and 2015, from 68 to 46 today. Since 2007, all death sentences have to be examined by the highest court.
This was intended to reduce the number of executions.
However, the Supreme Court recommends that death sentences be given with a two-year grace period.
After these two years, an execution should be avoided if possible.
There are no official data on this.
To this day, China's law enforcement is largely based on confessions.
That is why it is said to happen again and again that prisoners are forced to make confessions at the local level through physical and psychological abuse - which may be false as a result.
The government in Beijing officially speaks out against the use of such interrogation methods.
Nevertheless, there are always such incidents.
Victims report deprivation of food and sleep, beatings and sexual assault by police officers.
Human rights organizations also criticize the practice of administrative detention: in this case, a police authority can independently order detention without a decision by the public prosecutor.
This possibility repeatedly leads to arbitrary arrests, especially of opponents of the regime.
Human Rights in China: One Child Policy and Household Registration System
For many years, international human rights organizations also focused on the "one-child policy", which has since been abolished.
The birth control established in 1979 was intended to counteract the country's overpopulation.
Most Chinese have only had one child since then.
A change in the law in 2002 allowed ethnic minorities and rural populations to have more than one child.
From 2013, the rules were gradually relaxed for the urban population as well.
On January 1, 2016, the one-child policy was abolished.
Today every couple can have two children.
Above all, critics accused China of enforcing the one-child policy with draconian means: spying by neighborhood committees, forced abortions or sterilization.
Couples who gave birth to a second child had to pay heavy fines.
The one-child policy also had social consequences that China is now feeling.
Because of the traditional preference for boys, many female fetuses have been aborted.
As a result of such gender-specific abortions, an average of only 1,000 girls were born for every 1,100 boys over many years.
Therefore there are many young men today who cannot find women - because there is a surplus of men in their generation.
Another problem for many Chinese is the strict household registration system "hukou" from the Mao era.
In this system, every Chinese is administratively tied to the place of his birth.
There he has to go to school and get health and pension insurance.
In other places people do not have access to many public services.
This should prevent uncontrolled migration into the cities and slum formation.
This has succeeded, but at high costs, especially for the rural population.
Social services in rural areas are usually less well developed.
The cities need the labor of migrant workers: inside - but still do not grant them the same rights as those who were born there.
Many migrant workers, for example, leave their children with their parents in the villages because they cannot go to school in the city.
Although this system is gradually being relaxed, it is still a disadvantage for people from rural regions today.
Human rights in China: censorship and lack of freedom of expression
Although freedom of expression was incorporated into the Chinese constitution in 1982, public statements by citizens are still strictly controlled.
The government in Beijing justifies arrests in most cases with an impending threat to the state.
However, human rights organizations usually see this as an attempt to silence opponents of the regime.
Academic debates are also increasingly being controlled again.
Most of the media is owned by the state and strictly controlled by the CCP's propaganda organs.
For sensitive topics such as disasters or political problems, they must use reports from the official Xinhua news agency.
With the “Great Firewall”, China has also set up one of the most comprehensive systems for Internet control.
Many international websites or apps - from Facebook and WhatsApp to media like the
New York Times
- are blocked in China and can only be reached with the help of Virtual Private Networks (VPN).
In social media and chat rooms, the censorship systematically filters out unwanted terms.
Internet companies are responsible for their content and therefore have to employ censors themselves who comb their pages for prohibited content and delete them.
Human Rights in China: Ethnic Minorities
China is big and there are millions of non-Han Chinese living on its territory.
These so-called 56 ethnic minorities.
Officially, members of these minorities enjoy certain special rights.
They are allowed to speak their own language and teach at school, and in times of the one-child policy they were allowed to have more children.
But not all minorities enjoy this status.
Those who question the Han Chinese-dominated political system face the hard hand of the state.
Beijing is always cracking down on regional independence movements in particular.
The Tibetans were hit shortly after the founding of the People's Republic.
Since the Chinese army marched into Tibet in 1950, over a million Tibetans have reportedly been killed - including during the 1959 Tibet Uprising and the Mao-instigated Cultural Revolution from 1966 onwards. During the 1959 uprising, peaceful protests against the rule of China struck Area partially in violence;
and China let the army intervene.
In this turmoil, the young Dalai Lama fled to India via the Himalayas.
During the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards attacked Tibet's monasteries and art treasures;
many were irretrievably destroyed.
The current biggest focal point is the northwest Chinese region of Xinjiang, in which several Muslim minorities live.
There were always minor riots there;
Terrorists from the region also carried out a few small attacks in China.
In 2009, anti-Chinese riots broke out in the provincial capital, Urumqi.
The majority of the Muslim Uyghurs, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz people are not extremists.
In recent years, however, Beijing has tightened control of the region.
Surveillance cameras were set up in the cities;
the internet was turned off for a while.
For some time now there have been serious reports that China has interned up to a million Uyghurs in re-education camps in order to assimilate them into Chinese culture.
Former inmates report individual sexual assaults, torture and forced sterilization.
China rejects these allegations and describes the camps as training camps.
Some politicians in the US and Europe describe what is going on in Xinjiang as genocide, or cultural genocide.
China also rejects that.
An independent examination of the allegations has not yet been possible as of the beginning of 2021.
Human rights in China: reactions to the allegations
In 2009, the Chinese government published an action plan on human rights for the first time.
With this government program, Beijing promises to improve the relevant laws - but also emphasizes that individual freedoms must be weighed against the rights of the community.
Human rights organizations such as Amnesty International supported many of the proposed changes to the Action Plan, but criticized the omission of integral issues such as freedom of expression, the death penalty and internet censorship.
Beijing always emphasizes that the successful liberation of the Chinese people from poverty is the "true realization of human rights".
Not every single person can be granted individual freedom.
The communist leadership also regularly emphasizes its point of view that Western nations are promoting the human rights discussion solely to weaken China politically and to prevent its rise.
Western states reject these allegations.