China Announces "Human Rights Action Plan," Baidu Still Bans Forums on "Human Rights"

On September 29, 2016, China’s official news agency Xinhua published a report entitled “China Publishes New Action Plan on Human Rights.” Some excerpts:

The Chinese government on Thursday published its third national action plan on human rights protection, addressing challenges and promising to improve people's standard of living and quality of life.

The National Human Rights Action Plan of China (2016-2020), released by the State Council Information Office (SCIO), follows the previous two which covered 2009-2010 and 2012-2015 periods.

From the section of the Action Plan entitled “Rights of Expression and Supervision”:

Services shall be further improved for netizens to express their opinions, and great store shall be set on social sentiments and public opinions as expressed on the Internet.

These screenshots were taken on September 30, 2016, and show that Baidu continues to ban users from establishing PostBar (Tieba 贴吧) forums on the topic of “Human Rights” (人权)， “freedom” （自由), and “speech” (言论).