Courts With Chinese Characteristics
Why Beijing's Flourishing Legal System Still Has a Ways to Go
Article Summary and Author Biography
China's legal system is more formalized and better functioning than many realize. Still, given the Chinese Communist Party's lock on judicial power, the country still has work to do.
JEROME ALAN COHEN is Adjunct Senior Fellow for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This essay is adapted from an article in the new issue of the Japanese journal, Foreign Affairs.
Review Essay
Both supporters and detractors of China’s government pay a great deal of attention to the country’s high-profile dissidents. Yet as a new documentary about the artist and critic Ai Weiwei shows, the real challenge to today’s repressive leadership will not come from celebrity activists but from the public’s growing awareness of its rights and its increasing willingness to defend them.
A policeman leads inmates as they walk along a road in the Emei Mountain region of China. (Courtesy Reuters)
Just 40 years ago, as my family and I were completing a very pleasant and productive academic year in Japan, we had our first opportunity to visit China. We had been waiting to do so for more than a decade. For me, the highlight of the visit was a four-hour dinner conversation with Prime Minister Zhou Enlai. Never one to waste time, and always well-briefed on each of his guests, with a certain air of bemusement Zhou said to me, "I understand you have done many books about our legal system." With his country still emerging from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, I thought that Zhou might be politely implying that I had made more of the Chinese legal system than China had.
As we both knew, the country's formal legal system, which had been based on the Soviet model, was in tatters and had been for many years. The National People's Congress, China's highest state body, was not functioning. The Ministry of Justice and the Procuracy, which were responsible for prosecuting cases and supervising the government on legal matters, were defunct. The courts were in a state of collapse. The 1957-58 "anti-rightist" campaign had abolished the legal profession; the country's few law schools and law journals had closed. Institutions for arbitrating foreign business disputes had atrophied and the People's Republic was but a passive observer to the international organizations and agreements that ordinarily regulate nations' relations...
