“The ultimate human right is that people can lead a happy life.”  

Those are words of Chinese President Xi Jinping in a congratulatory letter written on December 10, 2018 to a forum marking the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

China’s people-centred human rights philosophy seeks to protect fundamental rights that mankind must be accorded to enjoy life. 

These include the right to a clean environment, the right to good health, and eventually, the right to enjoy a fuller and fairer share of the country’s development. 

The ultimate goals are to create an equal society where social fairness and justice are at the centre, and work towards meeting the people’s aspirations for a continuously better life. 

Those who run the government on behalf of the people - because the goal is to have the people run the country in the development of the whole-process people’s democracy - want to ensure that the fundamental interests of the majority of Chinese people are safeguarded. 

China has ratified or acceded to 36 international human rights treaties. These include six core UN human rights treaties. 

China has also been elected as a member of the UN Human Rights Council five consecutive times. As a testament to China’s human rights record, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights has since 2017 thrice adopted the resolution The Contribution of Development to the Enjoyment of All Human Rights proposed by China. 

This shows that China’s human rights philosophy and achievements have been widely recognised by the international community, according to Liu Yantao, Chinese ambassador to Cyprus. 

China has completed its mission of building a moderately prosperous society and put an end to absolute poverty nationwide. 

In 2021, China’s per-capita income reached $12,551, more than the global average. There are smiles on more Chinese people’s faces today. 

This can also be seen in how the people cheer for their leaders even in seemingly small actions. 

According to human nature, a happy person will be more willing to help a stranger on the street than a sad one. 

During my short stay in China so far, I have on more than five occasions stopped strangers on the streets to ask for help, whether it is for direction, for interpretation of a Chinese text or having someone send money to my Alipay app in exchange for cash, and on all occasions, the strangers helped me without any hesitation. 

At the beginning, I did not understand this phenomenon given the fact that I come from a country where being approached by a stranger will instinctively make your adrenaline devise some defensive mechanism at first. Until the stranger makes you more comfortable by speech or action. 

Then I later realised that most of the people in China are happy, meaning the CPC has, to a large extent, achieved its objective of ensuring that the society at large is one happy family.

In October 2021, at the General Debate of the Third Committee of the 76th Session of the UN General Assembly, Ambassador Zhang Jun, China’s permanent representative to the UN, summed it up: “The best answer for China’s human rights situation lay in the happy lives and smiling faces of the Chinese people.” 

The author is a correspondent with The Star in Kenya