In late April the US State Department announced the US-China Human Rights Dialogue will take place in May in Washington DC. The US delegation will be led by Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, Michael Posner while the Chinese delegation will be headed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Director General for International Organizations Chen Xu.

China’s police are notorious for their lack of respect for human rights, and tales of torture in custody are all too common here. Andrew Livingstone reports on the men that surprised a Hubei court by changing their pleas on trial.

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With its over 1.3 billion people, almost one fifth of humanity, China has had to take stringent measures to deal with its population explosion. For the past three decades, China's one-child policy has effectively prevented four hundred million births, a number greater than the entire U.S. population. In many ways, the policy seems to have worked: With fewer mouths to feed, poverty has fallen, living standards have improved dramatically, and China has become an economic power to be reckoned with. However, as a result of the one-child policy, China faces new problems: a looming demographic disaster as the population ages, social and psychological problems of the only-child generation, and criticism from overseas concerning human rights violations. After 30 years' of implementation, the government-established deadline for the policy is just around the corner, and a fierce debate rages over whether to keep the policy in place, or to abolish it.

President Obama's meeting with the Dalai Lama at the White House this week put further strain on the Sino/US relationship. Beijing reacted angrily to the closed-doors meeting, by saying it had "seriously harmed" relations and summoning the American ambassador in Beijing to protest.

The denunciation came shortly after Obama pledged to support Tibetan rights in his White House talks with the leader of Tibetan Buddhist leader.

It's an issue that really pides American and Chinese opinion. CNN recently did a poll that showed the three quarters of Americans think Tibet should be an independent country. The poll also found that 53 percent of Americans think its more important to take a stand on human rights than to maintain good ties with China. Here, of course, people's opinions are very different.

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