Extrajudicial killings in Bangladesh, ethnic violence in Burma and lack of free press in Cambodia are all indicators of a drift toward authoritarianism in many Asian nations. Some countries, though, have bucked this trend; except in conflict areas like Kashmir widespread rights violations in India are the exception rather than the rule. Still the region is home perhaps the globe’s worst human rights offender aging dictator, Kim Jong Il in North Korea, who has set the standard for state repression with prison camps of hundreds of thousands and a strangle-hold on resources.

As other Asian states like the Philippines and Thailand make halting progress toward protecting human rights, China stands out for a lack of fundamental freedoms and routine human rights violations against its population of 1.3 billion. The research scholar Li Xiaorong commented bluntly that “after a generation of economic development, after many rounds of US-China human rights dialogues and after millions of dollars of assistance to promote ‘rule of law and other ’reforms’,” still, “The human rights situation in China has not fundamentally improved.”

Large swaths of Chinese minority groups, such as Uighurs and Tibetans have few guaranteed rights amid ongoing and continuous state oppression that includes lethal indiscriminate force. The country heavily censors press, lawyers have “disappeared” indefinitely and at least 26 Chinese journalists are in prison. Human rights activists are also regularly silenced by imprisonment. An estimated 500,000 people have been imprisoned without charge or trial. In bureaucratic double-speak China amended the constitution in 2004 to read that, “the state respects and preserves human rights,” but continued imprisoning high-profile dissidents such as Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo on "subversion" charges. China’s human rights record threatens the popular belief that global economic interdependence will bring consensus that states should, if not protect human rights, at least value them.