I think there are. Certainly I was a big fan of the village elections when they came out 10 years ago. I thought this was going to empower people with a sense of citizenship and then they'd start electing at higher levels, and by about 2008 we'd have a democratic system in China. It turns out, as with most of my predictions about Chinese politics over the past 30 years, that I was wrong again. The village elections stopped at the village level, and the effective power was still in the hands of the non-elected Chinese Communist Party secretary. It's not very meaningful and hasn't led to citizenship.
But we do have important programs: CIDA, the civil society program, which is supposed to assist the development of the NGO sector in China. It's difficult to do, because most NGOs in China don't have proper legal status. We can do these programs like trying to train Chinese judges, developing a sense of transnational identity for professionals, so that the police want to do policing in accordance with international standards, so they don't see themselves just as Chinese police but see themselves as modern police who have colleagues in many countries. There are a lot of areas in which we can try to do a bit of value-added to promote human rights.
I don't like the parliamentary exchange, frankly, because the National People's Congress is not anything like the Parliament of Canada. When you go there, in effect you're establishing a sort of moral equivalence: we're all parliamentarians together; you have a different kind of parliament from ours. I think we should be careful in activities that provide some credibility to Chinese institutions that don't really deserve it.