In search of fair play and justice in China

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In search of fair play and justice in China
Frank Ching / Oct 13

CHINA has performed a miracle over the last quarter-century, lifting
hundreds of millions of people from dire poverty and turning the country
into an economic powerhouse. In the process, Beijing has raised people�s
expectations not only of a better life but of a fairer society.
Now, however, there are many who feel that the Government has let them down.

Sometimes, a tragedy causes the Government to sit up and take notice. One
such event was the beating to death last year in Guangzhou of a 27-year-old
university graduate, Sun Zhigang, because he could not show his temporary
residence card. The outcry that followed caused the State Council to rescind
a regulation allowing police to detain people who failed to produce local
residence permits.

However, the Sun Zhigang case was an exception. Most of the time, the
central Government seems to turn a blind eye to the outrages perpetrated by
provincial and local authorities.

People with grievances across the country stream to Beijing to present
petitions and demand justice. But such is the demand that the redress system
is overwhelmed and unable to cope.

The ongoing saga of Chen Guangcheng, a 34-year-old blind man in Yinan
county, near the city of Linyi in Shandong province, offers a perfect
illustration of the problems involved.

Chen can be described as a "barefoot lawyer" since he has no law degree and
is largely self-taught through getting his wife and older brother to read
law books to him. He provided legal help to friends and neighbours,
successfully arguing, for example, that disabled people who cannot work are
not liable to pay agricultural tax.

His problems began when he took up the cudgels to help people victimised by
family planning officials who flagrantly violated the law through forced
abortions and compulsory sterilisations. If a pregnant woman went into
hiding, the authorities would jail her relatives and neighbours and beat
them until she turned herself in.

Officials in Beijing agreed that such behaviour was a flagrant violation of
Chinese law. However, so far they have not lifted a finger to help this
blind man, who has been beaten up, detained and interrogated, and who now is
under virtual house arrest and allowed no visitors. His computer has been
seized and his telephone cut so that he cannot communicate with the outside
world. Lawyers from Beijing who went to Linyi to offer their services were
also beaten up.

So far, the central Government seems unwilling to involve itself in the
case, even though it has been highly publicised in the international Press.

When criticised by the international community about such things as forced
abortions, China routinely insists that they do not represent government
policy and are against the law. But often such illegal behaviour is a direct
result of pressure from Beijing on local officials to enforce birth quotas.

It is hypocritical, therefore, for the central Government to pretend that
such illegal acts are not officially sanctioned. Certainly, when the central
Government knows about such abuses and does nothing, it looks even worse.
Laws are meaningless of they are not enforced.

Thanks to the Communist Party�s economic and other reforms, expectations are
rising in China along with a much stronger sense of individual rights. One
way to ease such pent-up pressures and to create a more harmonious society
is to allow an independent judicial system to provide recourse. This is what
happens in other societies.

A major problem that prevents courts from acting independently in China is
that judges are paid by local governments and are often considered
extensions of the bureaucracy. Then when people with grievances against
local governments go to court and run into a blank wall, it simply increases
their sense of frustration.

Things do not have to be this way. Beijing has known for years about the
problems of the legal system and especially about local protectionism. The
Supreme People�s Court has been talking at least since the mid-1990s of
developing a nationwide judiciary whose members are paid not by local
officials but out of the judiciary�s funds, allocated by the central
Government. Such a move would go a long way to making the judiciary more
independent, and yet so far the Communist Party has not shown the political
will to institute such a pressing reform.

Beijing needs to bite the bullet and make that happen. It should see the
Chen Guangcheng case as an opportunity to build up a strong legal system
and, in the process, show the international community that the Chinese
Government means what it says about building a society where rule of law
holds sway.

Frank Ching is a Hong Kong-based writer and commentator.

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