On April 14, the Chinese cabinet presented its first piece of tangible, governmentally drafted human rights legislation. Most notably, the national human rights action plan ensures that all citizens have the right to a fair trial. The plan encourages citizen participation by granting the Chinese people the right to openly question and challenge government policies.

The bill further endorses citizen participation by discouraging torture and by promising better treatment of detainees. According to The New York Times, the plan also includes protection for children, women, senior citizens, ethnic minorities, and people with disabilities.

While the plan’s language sounds progressive and just, many are skeptical of how effectively the plan will be implemented.

“Even though the drafting of the bill shows positive signs of China’s interests in human rights issues, I don’t see how the plan could be put into practice seeing as any implementation would require years of work by central, local, and provincial government agencies, many of which show little interest in initiatives that may limit their power,” said Associate Professor of Political Science and East Asian Studies George Guo.

Junior East Asian studies major Jonathan Richter agreed.

“I’m somewhat skeptical of the legislation because China’s government is a top-down system, meaning that policies need to be implemented on lower levels (in order to be effective),” Richter said. “And at each level of government, from village to township, there’s always corruption”

As more and more international attention is being paid to China in the wake of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, governments from other countries and human rights activists alike have been putting increasingly large amounts of pressure on China to address, and to improve upon, its plethora of human rights violations.

“China’s initiative might be caused by both international and domestic pressures,” Guo said. “As China is rising, it has increasingly cared about its image in the world in general, and in its leading role in the U.N. in particular.”

“The world is really paying attention to China,” Ricther said. “There is a lot of international pressure to see the bill succeed, and I hope for the sake of growing democracy that the bill will follow through.”

According to The New York Times, while the plan calls for public opinion to play a larger role in decisions, the document does not set out any specific goals for turning China into a democracy in which the people have a say in choosing their country’s leaders.