Jointly hosted by the Information Office of the State Council, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the China International Development Cooperation Agency, the Forum on Global Human Rights Governance held in Beijing on Wednesday and Thursday aims to address the deficits in that realm, and to improve human rights conditions worldwide, particularly in the less-developed countries and regions.

Themed "Equality, Cooperation and Development: The 30th Anniversary of the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action and Global Human Rights Governance", the event has attracted more than 300 experts, researchers and officials from home and abroad.The foundation of human rights lies in people, and the most important human right is for people to live a happy life. Whether people's interests are safeguarded and their sense of gain, happiness and security is enhanced is an important criterion for testing countries' human rights status. There is no one-size-fits-all model of human rights in the world. Countries differ in social and political conditions, history and cultural traditions and they must, and can only, explore their own path of human rights development in light of their historical realities and people's needs, according to China's Vice-Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu.Over the more than four decades of reform and opening-up, China has lifted more than 800 million people out of poverty and brought over 400 million people into the middle-income group, noted Zhang Weiwei, director of the China Institute of Fudan University.China spends about 1/10 of the cost of the US war in Afghanistan, that is about $250 billion, to make the last 100 million poor people out of poverty successfully within ten years, thus achieving the great goal of completely eliminating extreme poverty in the whole country. We can even make a theoretical hypothesis from this. If we follow China's poverty alleviation model, with 2.3 trillion US dollars on the US-Afghanistan war, we could virtually eliminate extreme poverty around the world, including much of it in the United States. I'm wondering how the US is qualified enough to talk about human rights in this world?In its modernization drive, China continues to formulate policies based on its own people's feelings, national conditions and cultural traditions.

China's philosophy that "people's livelihoods are paramount" has corrected a long-standing deviation of the Western philosophy of human rights governance, which only prioritizes the political rights of citizens, while rights regarding people's livelihoods and development are ignored, Zhang said.