New Regulations on Discipline from CCP's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection

By Jerome A. Cohen

The new regulations on discipline from the CCP's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection are fascinating and worthy of serious research. How are targets of discipline selected? Is the clause on prohibited reading merely used as an add-on in cases where other charges are brought or is it sometimes applied independently? What procedures apply and how is evidence introduced and evaluated? What Communist Party and administrative sanctions are applied in what circumstances? To what extent does the CCDI system send cases to the courts for criminal punishments? To what extent does the CCDI system influence the handling of such criminal cases by the police, the procuracy and the courts?

I believe that, under the awning of the National Supervisory Commission, certain non-Party members are also subject to these strictures if they are government officials of one kind or other. Is there anyone out there who knows and is free to tell us? It must be a matter of considerable interest to the millions who are subject to this discipline. 

The New Amendments to the PRC's Counter-Espionage Law

The first thing to keep in mind about the amendments to the counter-espionage law – and any law in the PRC – is that the secret police are free to ignore it when they deem it desirable to do so. Despite their actions cloaked in secrecy, many cases of lawless action eventually become known to the public and to foreigners, as recent cases again illustrate.

It is encouraging to see that the forthcoming law will be amended to protect “individuals”, i.e., including foreigners, rather than only “citizens”. But no one should be foolish enough to rely on the paper protections of human rights in this legislation or the PRC’s other provisions relating to criminal justice.

Second, speculation about how the vague terms in the amended law will actually be interpreted and applied should await promulgation of a new set of Detailed Implementing Rules as well as regional and local regulations.

Third, it is unclear which of the relevant legal institutions will exercise the most power over enforcement of the law. Surely it will not be the courts. Will it be the local Communist Party Political-Legal Committee? The organs of the Ministry of State Security? Or the recently-established National Supervisory Commission and its agents? And how meaningful is it to state that espionage cases are subject to law when the Criminal Procedure Law allows criminal investigators to detain a suspect incommunicado for six months before a decision is made to initiate conventional criminal procedures and when in espionage cases those procedures are applied in blatant denial of basic due process rights?

The anticipated amendments to the espionage law add to the already breathtaking breadth of its provisions. Acts of espionage will now include “seeking to align with an espionage organization and its agents”. The new law will protect not only state secrets and intelligence but all “other documents, data, statistics, materials and other items related to national security”. And officials are admonished, of course, to take “a holistic view of national security” in applying the terms of the law.

The new law will also proscribe espionage in China that targets a third country and will punish PRC nationals who while abroad allow themselves to be used by an espionage organization.

Reflections on Jiang Zemin

By Jerome A. Cohen

I have enjoyed the media obituaries and listserv commentaries on Jiang Zemin but hope that there will eventually be appraisals of his contributions to PRC efforts to establish government under law in the post-Tiananmen era. Some very significant criminal justice reforms were adopted when the nation’s Criminal Procedure Law was revised in 1996, and many legislative and regulatory reforms relating to the economy took place in order to make the PRC a plausible candidate for the WTO. Prime Minister Zhu Rongji played a key role regarding the latter, of course, and did recognize the importance of the rule of law to foreign investors. Yet I don’t recall Jiang Zemin saying much of significance about law reform.

I do vaguely recall my disappointment at his reaction to a question about a human rights case that I managed to get someone to ask him at an appearance in Washington. I wanted to bring to his attention - and the public’s - the arbitrary detention of a dissident whose family I was advising. He simply dismissed the question by saying that, since the Public Security Bureau had taken the action, he was sure that the government had reasonable grounds for acting. I would have been wiser to try “the back door” by asking Wang Daohan, whom I knew fairly well and who was thought to be important in promoting Jiang’s rise, to put in a quiet word for my client.

My Thoughts on the Proposed HK Electoral Reforms

By Jerome A. Cohen

It has recently been reported that Beijing plans to “reform” Hong Kong’s election system, expanding the membership in the local legislature and the Election Committee that selects the Chief Executive in order to assure its control. This is obviously the end of the political democracy envisioned by One Country Two Systems as agreed in the Joint Declaration and the Basic Law. It is the comprehensive culmination of a piecemeal process that has been under way for some time. Hong Kong will still have a governmental system called 1C2S, but its content has now dramatically changed. The forms of government in HK will continue to be distinct from those on the Mainland but the substance will plainly be the same – the Chinese Communist Party will call the shots and its minions in HK will loyally implement this new manifestation of socialist democracy with Chinese characteristics and be rewarded as “patriots”.

This is not only a huge defeat for the people of HK but also a huge embarrassment to Xi Jinping and the CCP before the world. It is also implicit disrespect for one of Deng Xiaoping’s landmark achievements, which is consistent with other efforts by the Xi regime to downgrade Deng’s status.

Moreover, the Xi regime will not stop at transformation of the electoral system. It will next accelerate the efforts it has been making to rein in the courts and the legal profession. All branches of government must be brought to heel in a totalitarian system. And these “reforms”, of course, are only part of the broader effort to transform Hong Kong society through reshaping education from kindergarten through university, from dominating the media and via other means.

The PRC Legal System’s Unobtrusive International Impact

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.

Xi Jinping’s aspirations

We are witnessing an important modification of the Deng Xiaoping era, personalistic one-man rule enhanced by efficient Party controls of all aspects of life.

By Jerome Cohen

On Sunday, China’s National People’s Congress passed the comprehensive constitutional amendment proposed by the Communist Party under Xi Jinping’s leadership. The vote, which had the support of 2,957 delegates (with only two “no” votes and three abstentions), is what I anticipated. The leadership had to show a few dissenting voices among the almost 3,000 delegates in order to give the appearance of freedom on the part of the delegates. But it wanted, at the same time, to have a show of overwhelming support for the constitutional changes, unlike on some occasions where as many as 100 delegates have either voted against or abstained from voting with respect to certain reports on the legal system. 

The leadership had to work hard in recent weeks first to press the Communist Party Central Committee to go along with its proposal and then the National People’s Congress delegates. Without the advance approval of the leadership it would have taken a brave, indeed foolhardy, person to express dissatisfaction in the current circumstances where the Xi Jinping machine had gone all out, using fear, intimidation and incentives, to achieve its goal. 

We are witnessing an important modification of the Deng Xiaoping era, personalistic one-man rule enhanced by efficient Party controls of all aspects of life, increasing intolerance of dissent, more direct government controls of business and ever greater repression through the new supervisory commissions.

Ironically, this Constitutional amendment changed the wording in the Preamble from ”健全社会主义法制” to “健全社会主义法治.” I have always understood the newly-inserted last character in the phrase to symbolize the aspiration for China to achieve government under law (法治) rather than merely rule by law (法制). I think its insertion in the current circumstances is an attempt by the Xi Jinping crowd to hijack the term in accordance with his clear preference to rule the country by law rather than continue the reality of lawlessness in some crucial respects, as in shuanggui (双规), the party punishment that lacks any legal basis.

That is why we are getting the supervisory commissions fig-leaf of officiality and that is why, in order to feel comfortably free to plan on indefinite tenure as “president”, Xi insisted on amending the Constitution so everything can be done “according to law”.

Of course, there is no intent to place his actions under the law, and it is disappointing that the amendment does not come to grips with the Constitution’s Article 37 in an attempt to reconcile the National Supervisory Commission’s (NSC) “liuzhi” (留置) detention with Article 37’s restrictions on detention and arrest. (Perhaps that is being left to forthcoming relevant legislation—the NSC Law and a possible Organic Law of the NSC system to match the organic laws of the other institutions that purportedly fall under the National People’s Congress. Or it can be done later via a National People’s Congress Standing Committee interpretation or perhaps even a Supreme People’s Court’s interpretation if necessary.)

Everyone talks about Xi Jinping wanting to be another Mao Zedong. Some observers compare Xi’s ascent to the story of Putin. I have been saying for a long time that Xi’s goal is to out-do Stalin, without all the killing, and he may well succeed. He really is following the Stalin centralization of power, suppression of dissent, model that emphasized “the stability of law” even as Stalin used it as an instrument to promote the slaughter of millions.

China’s Chief Justice’s Extraordinary Statement: The Most Enormous Ideological Setback for a Professional Judiciary

Here is Flora Sapio’s original blog post about China’s Supreme People’s Court Chief Justice Zhou Qiang’s recent statement, which has provoked some unusual public opposition from China’s law reformers. Several aspects distinguish Zhou Qiang’s new and surprising statement.

It is much more threatening to the judicial cadres than the usual recitation about the importance of following the Party line. It focuses almost exclusively on “morality” and political reliability.  Its reference to heroic historical figures is surely bizarre and suggests that the recent investigation of the Supreme People’s Court by the Central Discipline Inspection Commission must have uncovered judges’ lack of reverence for Chairman Mao as well as their continuing desire for judicial independence from Party interference. This statement is the most enormous ideological setback for decades of halting, uneven progress toward the creation of a professional, impartial judiciary. It has already provoked some of China’s most admirable law reformers and public intellectuals to speak out in defiance, and, despite their prominence, I fear not only for their careers but also for their personal safety. 

I see Zhou’s statement as possibly necessary in order for Zhou Qiang, an enlightened and progressive Party leader,  to have his appointment renewed by the 19th Congress. There is immense dissatisfaction among many judges, especially the younger judges, over Xi Jinping’s restrictive, anti-Western legal values being imposed on them, contrary to their largely-Western-type legal education. This comes at a time when the courts are undergoing reforms designed to reduce the numbers of officials called “judges” by as much as 60% in order to make the remaining judges more of an elite, receiving greater prestige and compensation and a better reputation for competency. Many younger officials are leaving the courts, and the procuracy too, for work in law firms, business and teaching. They do not want to spend their lives applying legal principles opposed to their largely Western-type legal education.

Scott Savitt’s new book, Crashing the Party: An American Reporter in China

Last night I had the privilege of interrogating Scott Savitt about his new book, Crashing the Party: An American Reporter in China, in a 90-minute program at the China Institute’s new residence in New York.

The book is a highly informative, great read about China in the period 1983-2000 when Scott succeeded in immersing himself in Chinese life in various ways starting as a student and ending as a newspaper publisher.

The book begins and ends with a vivid, still relevant description of what it’s like to be detained by the secret police for 30 days in the year 2000, so perhaps I am biased in its favor because of concern for “the rule of law”, but there’s much else in it of interest to a broad audience, and it’s painfully honest.  Scott, whom I had only met occasionally over the years until last night, proved to be a lively and stimulating witness before a good-sized crowd. It’s a shame he has been on China’s black list for so many years but, even without the opportunity to return to China, I’m sure he can write a sequel to this just-published book detailing China’s progress and his many China-related activities since 2000.

For those who will be in the NY area sometime between now and late March, I urge you to make the trek to the China Institute’s new downtown Manhattan location in order to see the really spectacular and quite large exhibition of celadon masterpieces from the Six Dynasties period. This could never have been shown in the Institute’s previous, much smaller space on 65th St.