ABSTRACT
A focus on China as a state in transition from pariah status helps identify the best ways in which the international community may attempt to influence that transition, and possibly those of other authoritarian states. The human rights situation in China remains serious. As China has become more powerful economically, particularly since the global financial crisis and its Olympics debut in 2008. In 1989, China's democracy movement was only one part of a worldwide stirring of peoples within socialist states seeking greater human rights and democracy. The most dramatic UN response to the killings around Tiananmen Square took the form of a resolution on China by the UN Human Rights Sub-Commission in August 1989. China's human rights progress has also normally been associated with communicative, not strategic, forms of Principled Engagement, working primarily through persuasion, socialisation, capacity building and empowerment. International engagement with China has, on occasions, involved elements of coercion in the form of sanctions.
