François de La Rochefoucauld famously said that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. The quip nicely sums up Chinese supreme leader Xi Jinping ’s legal reforms. The Chinese Communist Party is trumpeting the Oct. 23 decision of the Fourth Plenum of the 18th Central Committee as a major advance in the rule of law. Not quite. From the humblest policeman to the Supreme Court, the legal apparatus will continue to serve the Party. Nevertheless, something significant happened in Beijing: The Party recognized that a modicum of rule of law helps maintain social stability. Mr. Xi wants to give judges a bit more power and independence so they can help discipline individual Party cadres, even as the courts continue to take orders from the Party.
In the mid-2000s, Supreme Court President Xiao Yang started to professionalize the judiciary, but his work was undone by his successor. Mr. Xi wants to go further and institutionalize the hiring of competent judges, protect them against interference by local officials and set up circuit courts to extend the Supreme Court’s reach. Mr. Xi has earned public support with his anticorruption campaign, but it has also exposed how rotten the Party has become. As John Fitzgerald wrote in the Australian newspaper last week, communist parties conduct such rectification campaigns to maintain control over local officials, but they are ultimately ineffective: “Without a free press or formal avenues of popular redress, Leninist systems lack routine feedback mechanisms to alert higher authorities to signs of system degradation.”
One of the chief threats to China’s stability is the seizure of private land by local officials who then sell it to fund their lavish lifestyles. Violent clashes over land rights in a village near Kunming last month left eight people dead and were widely covered by the state media. The Fourth Plenum decision tackled this issue through a new emphasis on the constitution, which enshrines property rights. Mr. Xi’s slogan of “ruling the nation based on the constitution” is remarkable since dissidents are routinely locked up for arguing that the Party should be bound by the constitution. The state media often fulminate against the thought crime of “constitutionalism.” As with the courts, a distinction is made that individual Party cadres should be bound by the constitution, but not the Party itself.
This sophistry is known as a “socialist legal system with Chinese characteristics.” The Party’s ideologues square the circle by insisting that there will never be any conflict between the constitution and the leadership of the Party. Whether they’ll succeed is another matter. The chief weapon of Chinese human rights lawyers is exposing the legal system’s failure to follow the law. Mr. Xi has handed them and their successors a new arsenal to push for a true rule of law, one in which the Party is bound by its own rhetoric. Mr. Xi wants to strengthen Party rule, and he may succeed for a time. But Mikhail Gorbachev started glasnost with similar intentions. As a Leninist party’s capacity to govern is exhausted, its leaders come under pressure to adopt aspects of liberalism that are effective, and that increases the demand for more reform. http://online.wsj.com/articles/xi-jinping-turns-to-the-law-1415146916
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