The Rule of Law and China

A great article in the New York Times about the Chinese legal system.

Some pertinent highlights for what I want to talk about:

'As with the school collapses, the milk scandal involves a web of complicity linking company executives to government officials. Those connections make sorting out responsibility a delicate political task. Rather than allow the courts to weigh in, officials prefer to press complainants to take compensation, said Teng Biao, a lawyer in Beijing who is collecting material for a possible class-action lawsuit. “Traditionally in China, politics is always higher than the law,” he said.

“To protect Sanlu is to protect the government itself,” he added. “A public health crisis like this not only involves Sanlu. It involves many officials from authorities in the city of Shijiazhuang up to the central government. It involves media censorship, the food quality regulatory system and the corrupt deal between commercial merchants and corrupt officials.”'

'Many lawyers find it hard to ignore the entreaties of provincial judicial bureaus or lawyers associations, which they are required to join. Those groups are controlled by the Ministry of Justice, which ultimately makes the rules for licensing lawyers.'

'There was no outright ban on class-action lawsuits, but the association put in place onerous rules, including a requirement that lawyers report conversations with clients to the judicial bureaus[.]'

When I talk with people about China, and they mention democracy, I always say that it's a long way off, and far from the most important thing at this moment. Democracy, as we have seen in Iraq, is not a cure for what ails ya, it is a structure ensuring stability that can be functional only after many props are inserted for it to rest on, and one of the most important, and the one I always mention to people, is the Rule of Law. Rule of Law, basically, is the idea that no one is higher than the law, and that everyone respects the decisions of the law and of due process.

The law has to be basically respectable, of course, or no one would follow it.

As the above quote makes clear, this is definitely not the case in China. Things in China run on a personal basis, not an impersonal one, and the Law, if it is to be effective, must be impersonal. No one above it, and no one below (an ideal the West still has not entirely mastered.) I have written about this before, here.

A student and I discussed this a week ago, and, astoundingly to me, the Chinese reaction to the crisis is, "we should trust the government to handle it and to do what's right." Seeing as how the government is largely, though not entirely responsible, this struck me as foolish. Without a recourse to change, of course, there's little the Chinese people can say. Still, the reaction isn't so much, "we're powerless to do anything, we have to hope the government can help out," it's still "the government will do what's right." There's little sense in China of government ever being the problem, even with people who agree that the Mao years of Communist rule were devastating to the country.

There's also a sense that the government, as monolithic as it may appear in the west, is actually made up of fairly separate entities, and that the local government may not be on the people's side, but the central government will still do what's right, and that's the case here as well. Along with an increasing openness in the media and what's allowed to be reported on, it gives Chinese people the sense of progress.

How long will it continue though, until something bursts? Will the government ever really be able to put the law above the party, or, say, turn the army over to the country, instead of having a private Communist army? Watch and learn.