Promoting human rights through development: What China’s experience can offer global governance

China’s approach to human rights emphasizes development as the core pathway to improving living standards and protecting fundamental rights. Over recent decades, it highlights achievements such as large-scale poverty reduction, expanded education and healthcare systems, and broader social security coverage, framing these as key foundations for advancing human rights.
The model stresses that the rights to subsistence and development are the most basic human rights, and that each country should pursue a path suited to its own national conditions rather than adopting a single universal model. It also places people at the center of governance, arguing that human rights are best realized through policies that improve livelihoods and promote all-round human development.
At the international level, this perspective calls for peaceful, law-based and sustainable development, alongside greater global cooperation. It argues that ongoing conflicts and humanitarian crises continue to undermine basic rights and that stronger multilateral coordination is needed to build a more inclusive and balanced global human rights governance system.
Credit – CGTN