Two numbers make up this score, and they say different things. The Legal Index is 45: same-sex activity was decriminalised in 1997 and removed from the official list of mental illnesses in 2001, but there is no marriage and no partnership, no anti-discrimination law, changing your legal gender still requires surgery, and a 2016 broadcasting regulation lists homosexuality among "abnormal sexual behaviours" that may not be depicted. The Public Opinion Index is 66 — one of the highest in Asia, well above Japan (50), Taiwan (51) and South Korea (39). Ordinary Chinese people, especially younger urban ones, are markedly more accepting than their neighbours.

What the score cannot see is the part that actually changed. An index can measure what the law says and what people think; it cannot measure whether you are allowed to gather. Shanghai Pride ended in 2020 after eleven years. In 2021 dozens of university LGBT student accounts were deleted from WeChat overnight. LGBT Rights Advocacy China closed the same year. And in May 2023 the Beijing LGBT Center — the most prominent queer organisation in the country — shut down citing "force majeure". Attitudes stayed liberal. The room to organise around them closed.

This is the one dimension where the number needs no interpretation. The EIU puts China at 2.11 in 2024 — 145th of 167, an "authoritarian regime". Inside that score, the electoral process component is 0.00, which is as low as the index goes, and civil liberties sit at 0.88. There is no national vote for the leadership, one party holds power constitutionally, and the two-term limit on the presidency was removed in 2018.

Press freedom matches. Reporters Without Borders ranks China 178th of 180 in 2026, third from the bottom, and records 121 journalists and media workers in detention — the highest number of any country in the world. Domestic media operate under direct Party guidance, foreign platforms are blocked, and the censorship apparatus is not a filter added to the internet but part of how the internet is built here.

The two sources agree closely — lived conditions at 0.685 and legal frameworks at 70 — and both are measuring real things. Female labour-force participation is high by regional standards, education outcomes are strong, and abortion is legal on request and widely available, which is the reverse of the pattern in most countries with China's other scores. Domestic violence became a distinct offence in 2016.

What the indices do not capture is who is allowed to advocate for any of it. Five feminist activists were detained in 2015 for planning a campaign against sexual harassment on public transport. The #MeToo movement that followed was met with censorship of hashtags and accounts, and the most prominent case, brought by Zhou Xiaoxuan, was dismissed. And the reproductive-rights picture is more double-edged than "abortion is legal" suggests: the same administrative machinery that enforced the one-child policy for decades now runs a three-child pro-natalist policy, with local incentives and pressure pointing the other way. Access is real. Autonomy is a different question.

The World Justice Project puts China at 0.48 in 2025 — 92nd of 143, with the score up 0.8% and the rank up four places, one of the minority of countries moving upward in a year when 68% declined. That mid-table position is not an error. WJP measures order and constraint as separate things, and China's shape is unusually clear: everyday order, contract enforcement and personal security are strong, while the constraints that are supposed to limit state power are weak. Courts sit under Party political-legal committees rather than above them, so "the law works" and "the law binds the government" are two different statements here, and only the first is reliably true.

Not every country is measured on every value. Where the public data simply doesn't exist, we'd rather tell you than fill the gap with a guess — and China is one of those cases. So instead of a figure that would look precise without being it, here is as honest a summary as we can give of what is actually known.

The number on our other country pages comes from the US Department of Labor's yearly review of what governments are doing about the worst forms of child labour. That review covers the 131 countries that hold trade preferences with the United States, and China is not one of them, so it is not assessed at all.

The same department's other list, of goods rather than governments, tells you why the blank is not a clean bill of health. China is the largest single presence on it. Bricks, cotton, electronics, fireworks, textiles and toys from China are listed as produced with child labour, and a much longer list is recorded for forced labour — including garments, textiles and yarn traced back to Chinese cotton. So there is detailed evidence about Chinese products and no measurement at all of Chinese government effort. Publishing a number here would mean inventing the half that is missing.