Xinhua Insight: China's Communist Party committed to boosting human rights

Song Baoyou's family was thrown into poverty after he was diagnosed with uremia and they had to use most of their savings to pay for his life-saving treatment.

"I must have dialysis two times a week, otherwise I'll die," said the 41-year-old farmer from Huangtu Village in central China's Hubei Province.

Song said his biggest concern was his sons' education, because of the cost of their tuition fees.

Fortunately, the lives of rural people will get much easier, as the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) pledged to ensure every one of the 1.4 billion population achieve "an elevated sense of being well off."

CPC leaders have outlined the country's economic and social development plan in the 13th Five-year Plan (2016-2020) at the four-day Fifth Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee, which ended Thursday.

The authority's resolution to achieve "development for the people, by the people and shared by the entire population" was elaborated upon in a communique released after the plenum, signaling the Party is committed to boosting human rights.

In China, development is highlighted in the realization of human rights as only through development can people's aspiration for a better life be fulfilled and human rights and human dignity truly safeguarded.

SOCIAL SECURITY

China will extend the pension program to cover the whole elderly population and the state will channel more funding to the social security fund, the leadership decided at the key meeting.

Official statistics show that nearly 200 million Chinese are yet to be included under the pension program.

Moreover, the communique vowed, "China will implement the critical illness insurance system fully," suggesting that it will be rolled out to cover the entire population.

As of the end of September 2014, about 650 million Chinese were covered by critical illness insurance, relieving them of the financial burden of medical bills.

The authority stressed that policies and measures should ensure the whole population lives a moderately prosperous life.

Song has no need to worry about his sons' school fees. The government will abolish high school tuition fees for poor students and also provide subsidies for them, the start of a "gradual" waiving of tuition fees for secondary vocational education.

On the medical front, the country will also reduce medicine prices, coordinate health insurance with medical care, and set up a standardized health and hospital management system for urban and rural areas, according to the document.

ONE-CHILD POLICY

China will abandon its decades-long one-child policy and allow all couples to have two children, to rebalance the population, according to the communique.

The family planning policy was first introduced in the late 1970s to rein in the surging population by limiting most urban couples to one child and most rural couples to two children, if the first child born was a girl. The policy was later relaxed to allow parents to have a second child if they were both only children.

It was further loosened in November 2013 after the Third Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee, allowing couples to have two children if one of them was an only child.

Since its implementation, the one-child policy has resulted in an estimated reduction of some 400 million people in China, successfully containing over-population.

However, it has also been blamed for a number of social problems, such as the decreasing labor force and an ageing population.

The one-child policy was a compelled choice in such a populous country three decades ago, said Liu Huawen, deputy director of the human rights institute of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

"The policy change has been welcomed and will play a good role in boosting the human rights protection," Liu said.

POVERTY ALLEVIATION

Despite plans to build a moderately prosperous society by 2020, China still has more than 70 million people living under the poverty line.

To ensure that everyone can attain a moderately prosperous life, the top leadership has placed poverty alleviation high on the agenda for the 13th Five Year Plan.

The CPC vowed to improve people's livelihoods and lift the impoverished out of poverty in the next five years.

China pledged more support to this end. So far, more than 600 million people have been lifted out of poverty in the past three decades, accounting for about 70 percent of those brought out of poverty worldwide.

The country is aiming to double its 2010 GDP and per-capita income of residents both in cities and rural areas by 2020, according to the communique. Endi