China: Blind to Legal Abuses

Frank Ching  (Commentator based in Hong Kong)

China has performed a miracle over the last quarter-century, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of 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 was not carrying 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, that 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.

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.

Mr Chen has no law degree and is largely self-taught. 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 mainland 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 line 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.

When criticised by the international community about such things as forced abortions, Beijing 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.

Thanks to the Communist Party's economic and other reforms, expectations are rising 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.

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

Things do not have to be this way. 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.

Beijing should see Mr Chen's case as an opportunity to build 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 the rule of law holds sway.

(Originally appeared in the October 12, 2005 issue of South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, reproduced here with permission.)