China's human rights situation is still a distance removed from the global average, said Tung Li-wen, the foundation's deputy executive.

Too many people hold a rose-colored view of China's economic potential, forgetting that they are accompanying by huge corruption and a sacrifice of elementary human rights, said Chen Chun-ju, an assistant researcher at National Chengchi University's Institute of International Relations.

The foundation's annual report could help the world in understanding the truth about repression in China, and hear about Taiwan's concern for human rights in its giant communist neighbor, Chen said.

Despite promises to the contrary, China tightened its supervision of the Internet during the year of the Beijing Olympics, Chen said. The authorities used their own online supervision system known as the "Golden Shield," but also cooperated with multinational corporations when interfering online, she said.

Changes in laws regulating the judiciary have brought theoretical improvements, but on the ground the situation is different, with China intensifying its crackdown on journalists, opposition activists, religious believers and writers, said Academia Sinica law expert Liao Fu-te.

China is also still the nation in the world with the highest level of executions, though the number of immediate executions after a death sentence has for the first time dropped below the number of delayed death penalties, Liao said.

China's treatment of the media has also been exceptionally severe this year in the wake of the Olympics, riots in Tibet and Xinjiang, and the toxic milk powder scandal, said Tsai Chang-yen, the chairman of the East Asian Culture and Development department at National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei. The Beijing authorities didn't really pay much attention to criticism from overseas, he said.

China can only reach internationally acceptable standards of human rights if it democratizes, allowing its population free access to information from outside the state-controlled media, Tsai concluded.