The detention of civil rights activist and lawyer Xu Zhiyong shows that “China’s legal system is as harsh as ever,” according to The Economist, despite heightened rhetoric from the government about legal reform:
According to Ira Belkin, who runs the US-Asia Law Institute at New York University, the seeming contradiction between a crackdown on activists and genuine moves towards reform is, in fact, “bizarrely consistent”. The key, he says, is the focus by the Communist Party on social stability—ie, not only the risk of social unrest, but of any challenge to its authority. Stability depends upon public trust in the legal system, which is likely to improve when wrongful convictions are stopped.
At the same time, Mr Belkin says, when the authorities identify people as troublemakers, “they show no mercy in order to deter them and others”. Mr Belkin’s own belief, though, is that greater tolerance of peaceful critics of government would contribute more to social stability than the usual hardline approach to dissent laid down by Mao Zedong. For now, at least, the government seems unwilling to put that idea to the test. [Source]
Sources told Human Rights in China that Xu, who has been held since July 16, met with his new lawyer on Wednesday afternoon.
Elsewhere, The Committee to Protect Journalists notes that Chinese censors have disabled the microblog accounts of Zhu Ruifeng, an anti-corruption activist perhaps best known for leaking the sex videos that led to the downfall of former Chongqing party official Lei Zhengfu:
On July 16, one day after the Beijing-based blogger and founder of an anti-corruption website published corruption allegations about the chief secretary of Jinjiang city in Fujian province, his online presence disappeared.
Government censors disabled all four of his microblog accounts and blocked mainland access to his website, Renmin Jinduwang (“People’s Supervision”), which is registered in Hong Kong. Zhu issued a statement through another Sina Weibo user on July 17 saying that he is safe but that his “microblogs have to take a summer vacation.”