By Jerome A. Cohen
Agreements between the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Political-Legal Commission (CCPPLC) and foreign governments are a little-known but important aspect of the PRC legal system’s quiet international impact. The agreement between China and Belarus (中共中央政法委员会与白俄罗斯总统办公厅法治领域合作协议) is an interesting example of the CCPPLC directly making an agreement and cooperating with the President’s Office of a foreign government. The agreement was made between Meng Jianzhu, then Secretary of the CCPPLC, which controls the judiciary and Chinese intelligence and security services, and Stanislav Zas’, State Secretary of the Belarusian Security Council. Although the report published in the PRC court newspaper gives this interaction the appearance of innocuous and benign support for the “rule of law” and “judicial reform,” the excellent scholarly analysis by Ms. Nadège Rolland makes clear that this cooperation is an example of the export of the PRC’s surveillance and internal security system of repression. Belarus appears especially concerned with improving its censorship and cybersecurity, which the PRC is famed for perfecting.
From the diplomatic point of view, it is striking to see a Chinese Party organization concluding an agreement with a foreign government. Functionally, of course, this makes perfect sense since the Party organization controls the PRC government agencies involved, in this case the ministries for national security, state security and justice, as well as the procuracy and the courts. How much influence the CCPPLC has over other related government security and military agencies is also worthy of study. In the days of the USSR, the CCPPLC might have made a comparable Belarus agreement with that country’s Communist Party counterpart.
The PRC-Belarus cooperation cited above took place in 2016-2017. That was just before the PRC established its innovative National Supervisory Commission (NSC), a powerful new government institution for investigating and disciplining not only all Party members but also a broad swath of non-Party officials. Since the NSC seems to be more powerful than the government’s political-legal system, it would be good to know the extent to which the NSC might be affecting current cooperation with foreign governments regarding the “rule of law” and “judicial reform” as well as the CCPPLC’s present role in this respect.