Since facing Western criticism after the Tiananmen Square incident, China 's human rights discourse has changes. The precious view of human rights prioritized the right to existence and development, state sovereignty, and cultural relativism. The current view is closer to the international human rights mindset, which values the indivisibility of human rights, the right to intervene, and universality for all people. This change of discourse caused China to change its human rights foreign policy and become an active player in the international human rights regime.

China 's changed attitude can be seen in current issues. Internally, China announced a National Human Rights Action Plan for the first time in April 2009. This action plan indicated a goal and detailed measures to protect China 's human rights, similar to an economic development plan. Although some consider the action plan a way to distract the public from China's poor human rights record on the sensitive 20 th year anniversary of the Tiananmen incident, and although it contains clichés and ambiguities on thorny issues, it is still encouraging that the Chinese government spontaneously made human rights pledges, including underwriting a basic old-age insurance policy for migrant workers and reform of the household registration system. Moreover, its potential to start a ripple effect in Chinese people's understanding of human rights should not be underestimated. Externally, there is a tendency to link human rights to China 's foreign policy. The Hu administration has paid attention to soft power as well as hard power. Some Chinese experts on international politics regard participating and playing a leading role in the international system as an important way to enhance soft power and therefore argue that China should improve its human rights.

However, limitations still exist. China still maintains its previous rhetoric on human rights and this rhetoric is applied selectively when its serves China 's best interest. The representative case of this situation is the Chinese government's response to the Tibet issue. China propagates that it supports Tibetan human rights through economical development, based on the theory of the supreme right to existence and development. China also disapproved of Western criticism of the 2008 Tibetan bloodbath and condemned France 's friendly attitude toward Dalai Lama as foreign interference in internal affairs. The blocking of certain websites and public demonstrations a head of the Tiananmen anniversary in 2009 shoes that China still does not accept international human rights principles in cases closely connected to party control.