China’s trade partners feel the pain of “deceleration” in both directions, including the ports of Southern California. And with China’s economic growth under siege both at home and abroad, economists don’t believe Saturday’s RRR cut will solve the economy’s problems by itself and instead see it as a prelude to a broader economic stimulus policy by the government. From The New York Times:

“We expect more aggressive delivery of policy stimulus via quantitative easing, substantial tax breaks, fiscal spending and investment deregulation in the coming months to ensure a soft landing,” Qu Hongbin, the co-head of Asian economic research at HSBC, said in a report.

…

Interbank lending rates have been sinking in China, a sign that the banks have plenty of spare cash even without being told that they can hold smaller reserves.

The cut in the reserve ratio should be seen “more as a signaling device used by the government to show its willingness to loosen policy in light of the significant weakening in activity growth in April,” Yu Song, an economist at Goldman Sachs, wrote in a research report.

The state-run China Securities Journal hinted on Monday that any broader economic stimulus package would likely involve another RRR reduction, but MarketWatch’s Craig Stephen pointed out that attempts to expand lending might be met by a “demand deficit” as the amount of profitable investment opportunities continues to shrink. Still, Reuters reports that economists had already rushed to update their growth forecasts after the week’s bad news:

“We were wrong and we revise down growth forecasts,” was the straight-to-the-point heading in the message line of an email sent to clients by Ting Lu, China economist at Bank of America/Merrill Lynch in Hong Kong after Friday’s torrent of data drowned his call of a Q2 GDP bounce to 8.5 percent.

He now expects growth of 7.6 percent in Q2 and 8 percent for the year versus 8.6 percent previously. The consensus forecast for 2012 growth in the benchmark Reuters poll before Friday’s data was 8.4 percent.

Lu is struggling to understand why the April data was so far away from market expectations and thinks a new reporting system requiring China’s 700,000 biggest manufacturers, representing 90 percent of the total value added in the factory sector, to submit numbers directly the National Bureau of Statistics in Beijing – rather than local offices – might be the root cause.

Whatever is behind the drop-off, the new consensus view is that Beijing will have to raise its game to stop the rot.

With research analysts across the street cutting growth forecasts, and with the ongoing political standoff in Greece weighing even further on the confidence of investors, mainland stocks fell to their lowest level in three weeks on Monday and slid again on Tuesday to a 1-month low.  China’s Ministry of Commerce poured fuel on the fire by announcing on Tuesday that foreign direct investment (FDI) declined for a sixth straight month in April. Whether because of a lackluster global economy or a slowing Chinese machine, or both, one economist told Bloomberg TV that all signs seem to point in the same gloomy direction:

“Trade data was bad, production data last week was bad, and this time FDI is also pointing to the same direction,” Zhang Zhiwei, chief China economist with Nomura Holdings Inc. in Hong Kong, said in a Bloomberg Television interview today. The reports show a “very weak economy at this moment,” with chances of an interest-rate cut rising though “still below 50 percent,” Zhang said.

In his Bloomberg View column, William Pesek writes that “nobody beats the system” and reminds anyone who hoped for unimpeded economic growth in China that “no industrializing nation has ever avoided a financial crisis.” Even The China Daily noted that the slowing growth rate is “within expectations” though not indicative of a hard landing. Tsinghua University’s Patrick Chovanec told The Financial Times that despite the desire of many to write off a slow first quarter as “just a little dip,” April’s data shows that “those forecasts were mostly a triumph of hope over reason”:

“China’s been riding an investment boom over the last three years that everyone recognised was unsustainable and now we’re seeing what unsustainable looks like,” Mr Chovanec says. “The unravelling of this investment boom is happening with nothing to replace it and that means China is in store for much lower GDP growth than we’ve become accustomed to.”

Spotlight: State-Owned Monopolies

China made another move to limit the dominance of state-owned enterprises this week, part of its plan to structurally reform the economy, as the Supreme Court established new rules that will open the door for more antimonopoly challenges and allow plaintiffs to more easily make their case. From The Wall Street Journal:

The rules, which will go into effect June 1, are meant to “improve the competitiveness of enterprises and promote the healthy development of a socialist market economy,” said a court statement issued Tuesday.

Legal experts say the rules will lower the burden on plaintiffs to prove the existence of a monopoly. They also appear aimed at addressing mounting pressures from both inside and outside China to scale back the power of the nation’s vast state-owned firms and make way for more competition from private companies.

…

The new rules say plaintiffs in antitrust cases can now prove a defendant’s market dominance by using a defendant’s old and existing company statements, press releases and website information that state its leading market position. Third-party market analysis can also be used if agreed on by plaintiffs and defendants, and if an agreement can’t be reached the courts will appoint an expert, the rules say.

Luxury Brands Still Growing:

Amid the market slowdown, The China Daily reports that international luxury brands such as Gucci recognize the need to retool their China strategy:

“Yes, the rate of expansion will be slower than in the previous years,” Patrizio di Marco, president and CEO of Gucci, told China Daily.

Some other luxury brands, including LV and Chanel, will also slow their expansion in China starting this year, business analysts said.

Rather than just expanding their stores in China, the leading luxury brands are starting to pay more attention to upgrading their current stores.

Despite the slowdown, Gucci will relocate and enlarge some of its stores in China.

“It’s not (store) numbers, it’s how you engage with your customers that counts,” Di Marco said.

While growth in the sector may continue to slow, and several potential roadblocks exist, a new report by CLSA Asia Pacific Markets expects that China will continue to lead the global luxury boom. From The Wall Street Journal:

Mainland-Chinese customers generate roughly one-third of Gucci and Prada’s world-wide sales, he added, and it’s not uncommon for rich Chinese to spend one-quarter of their disposable income on luxury goods.

They are also, Mr. Fischer pointed out, becoming more discriminating. Gucci and other retailers are stocking fewer logo-emblazoned items in their Chinese stores as shoppers begin to gravitate to more subtle displays of wealth.

Other News

• Hong Kong’s securities regulator has proposed new rules that would leave banks criminally liable if they act as IPO sponsor for a company that lies to investors.
• The Chinese government cut fuel prices for the first time since October, a move which helps motorists but will hurt the bottom line of the country’s oil refiners.
• China’s National Development Reform Commission has ruled that private equity funds must raise 100% of their money from local sources if it wants to be treated as a local fund, a blow to foreign firms who already face a higher hurdle than their mainland counterparts.
• At Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder’s meeting this weekend, Warren Buffet was asked how long it would take for China to see a great company like Coca-Cola.
• Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse will move bankers to the mainland and apply for a stock trading permit as it seeks to take advantage of looser restrictions on foreign investment banks in China.
• Ford is trying to play catch-up with its rivals in China but faces headwinds, according to Reuters.

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Both cases are widely seen as emblematic. Bo’s embodies the corruption of an unchecked political elite: Communist Party members are investigated by the party’s own disciplinary committee, and not by the courts. Chen’s case is rife with the predatory behavior of local officials whose conduct is more reminiscent of China’s feudal past than of the “new socialist countryside” Beijing leaders claim to be building.

Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that the law doesn’t matter in China.

First, while Chen’s case entails the catalogue of unlawful measures that are used against government critics, it also embodies the rising assertiveness of a citizenry that is increasingly ready to defend its legal rights against official arbitrariness, corruption and injustice.

Land-rights activists, factory workers, forcibly evicted residents, arbitrarily censored netizens, ordinary consumers and environmental activists — citizens in China are increasingly committed to defending their rights.

Nevertheless, U.C. Berkeley Law Professor Stanley Lubman argues, China’s legal system is weak and the law still primarily, “serves as a tool to maintain the Party’s control of Chinese society.” He writes in the Wall Street Journal:

In considering the possibility that Chinese criminal law might be invoked to punish misconduct in either case, it would a mistake to think of China’s legal institutions as a “legal system.” Legal institutions in China, especially the criminal law, are part of a political system that ultimately directs their application and their use. They are essentially grounded on the dominant notion that law is to be used to keep the Party in power.

Laws are not implemented in a uniform manner in China. They are often vague, giving local officials the opportunity to ignore or vary their application and to exercise considerable discretion in many cases. Enforcement can be overly lax (as in cases of unlawful property takings by local governments or violations of food safety laws), excessively harsh, or downright ignored, as they were by officials in Shandong where Chen was harshly treated.

It is impossible to believe that Chen’s treatment was not well-known at high levels in Beijing. His case has provoked widespread coverage in the foreign press since 2005, and has been a topic of discussion among foreign NGOs and on the Chinese internet. The embarrassment that Chen has handed the leadership makes denial from Beijing of central government involvement in the ordeals of him and his family very difficult.

Nonetheless, admission of central government responsibility is unlikely. The most that can be expected is a conclusory statement about an investigation and its termination, probably with a token announcement about some punishment at the local level.

Read more about Bo Xilai, Chen Guangcheng, and rule of law in China via CDT.

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Some initial reactions from Twitter:

CPL reflects balance of power in pol institutions: Security apparatus did not get everything they wanted, but still increase their powers.

— Nicholas Bequelin 林伟 (@Bequelin) March 14, 2012

(See ‘Legalizing the Tools of Repression‘ for context.)

The threat of up to six months of incommunicado detention in a police ‘guesthouse’ now hangs over the head of every government critic. Grim.

— Nicholas Bequelin 林伟 (@Bequelin) March 14, 2012

当不义写进法律，则反抗就成为义务。

— 北风（温云超） (@wenyunchao) March 14, 2012

Wen Yunchao: “When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.”

包括秘捕条款在内许多侵犯人权行为的刑诉法，最终以赞成2639 反对160 弃权57获得通过。这些短视的橡皮图章共同构筑的疯狂，会被经济不景气这个即将到来的大浪掀得东倒西歪。再严苛的管控，都无法解决制度不良造成的就业形势艰难、贫富差距加大、通货膨胀攀升等要命大难题

— 冉云飞 (@ranyunfei) March 14, 2012

Ran Yunfei: “The Criminal Procedure Law, whose secret detention provisions contain numerous infringements of human rights, has finally passed with 2,639 votes for, 160 against, and 57 abstentions. The madness that these short sighted rubber-stampers have built together will be wrecked by the coming wave of economic recession. The perilously great problems that have arisen from systemic failures—poor employment prospects, an expanding gap between rich and poor, rising inflation, and so on—cannot be resolved by means of ever-harsher controls.”

历史上最长的年头是1984，苏联在1984徘徊了74个春夏秋冬。我共朝的1984也已持续63个四季。“严冬已经来临，春天还会远吗？”

— Hu Jia 胡佳 (@hu_jia) March 14, 2012

Hu Jia: “The longest year in history is 1984. In the Soviet Union, 1984 dragged on for 74 springs, summers, autumns and winters. Under our current dynasty, it’s already lasted 63 years. ‘If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’ [the closing line of Percy Bysshe Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind']“

For more on the amendment, see CDT’s previous coverage: most recently, ‘Does China’s New Detention Law Matter?‘, ‘Al Jazeera: Inside China’s “Black Jails”‘ and ‘Chatting with China’s Security Apparatus‘.

See also some satirical cartoons on the subject: ‘Article 73 in an Iron House‘, ‘Mirror, Mirror on the Wall…’ by Hexie Farm for CDT, and another at Hexie Farm’s own site.

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Human Rights Watch describes the law as it now stands:

Human Rights Watch welcomed provisions that could – if translated into practice – strengthen procedural protections and due process for ordinary criminal suspects, such as stricter time limits for detentions, better guarantees for access to a lawyer, and greater protection for juvenile and mentally ill defendants ….

However, under the revised law’s “residential surveillance” provision (article 73), law enforcement agencies would still have the power to detain national security or terrorism suspects in a designated location of the agencies’ choice for up to six months. Although the law enforcement agency imposing the measure would have to notify relatives within 24 hours, the notification would not require them to disclose the whereabouts of the person. The draft provision would also allow police to deny suspects’ access to a lawyer for the duration of the detention ….

Other provisions in the proposed legislation that would allow the secret detention of criminal suspects in “national security, terrorism and major bribery” cases for up to 37 days are found in articles 37 and 83.

These exceptions suspend the requirement to notify relatives within 24 hours if the law enforcement agency believes that such notification could “impede the investigation.”

While “national security” may suggest spying and sabotage, in China it can stretch to include poetry, as in the case of Zhu Yufu’s conviction earlier this year. The loophole is extremely elastic, and would comfortably have accommodated Zhu and others in the recent procession of subversion and incitement of subversion cases. At the Economic Observer (translated at WorldCrunch), Chen Jieren argued that:

… [In] China, the accusation of endangering state security is really a way of saying endangering the regime’s security. In other words, if the secret arrest of a suspected person is allowed, it means that China’s political ideas and values have more respect for a regime’s rights than individual human rights — and the state is more important than the public.

However, in a truly modern country that exists under the rule of law, human rights stand at the forefront of the order of society’s values ….

If we permit secret detention, then a law enforcement agency can always place the hat of a suspected terrorist on an arrested person ….

We believe that exposing all judicial proceedings to the bright light of the sun will not cause the sky to fall upon us, but will actually guide our society to the place where it may be illuminated by the rule of law and the supremacy of human rights.

As Pu Zhiqiang, a Beijing-based rights lawyer, told The Guardian’s Tania Branigan, “the real issue is not what the laws say, but how they are enforced.” (Police obstructed later attempts to contact Pu by Al Jazeera’s Melissa Chan and McClatchy’s Tom Lasseter.) How far the revised CPL will govern actual practice is an open question: if even the generous latitude it allows is felt to be overly restrictive, authorities may simply conduct outright illegal detentions as in the past. Chinese Human Rights Defenders’s newly released 2011 report (PDF, pp. 4-6) counts 3,833 documented cases of arbitrary detention last year, with 45% of the activists surveyed saying that they had been held at some point. Of these nearly four thousand cases, CHRD says that only 8% had a clearly established basis in law: 86% had none at all.

The Committee to Protect Journalists suggested last week that we ask Chongqing businessman Zhang Mingyu whether the new detention law will matter:

… From his apartment in Beijing on Wednesday morning, Zhang blogged that “the jigsaw puzzle of Wang Lijun should be revealed.” He didn’t have a chance to explain what he meant by that. Chongqing police had arrived at his door by the afternoon, and had told him to return to his city and stop writing about Wang, his lawyer Pu Zhiqiang told international reporters ….

What was Zhang about to reveal? Pu says that his client had a compromising voice recording of Wang Lijun, the ousted former Chongqing police chief, The Wall Street Journal reported. More damning news of fallen comrades would complicate the official picture of consensus in Beijing.

It is unclear where Zhang is now, or if he’s been accused of any crime. He hasn’t written anything since he noted “danger” on Wednesday evening, and he hasn’t been in touch with his lawyer. The Chongqing police have no jurisdiction in Beijing, Pu noted. Zhang’s sudden silence is one more reason for skepticism over the importance of Chinese laws as they are written.

Even if the new law is not honoured, however, it is significant as an indicator of the balance of power within the government. Human Rights Watch’s Nicholas Bequelin described the battle over the law’s provisions between conservative and relatively progressive elements in a recent New York Times op-ed; in a talk at Washington’s East-West Center earlier this month, he explained (24:50-30:30) the draft’s importance in the context of this year’s leadership transition. The new CPL is not only a “capstone legislation for the Hu-Wen administration”, but also a weather vane for rule of law and the influence of the security apparatus under its successor.

Human Rights in the Year of China’s Leadership Transition from East-West Center on Vimeo.

See more on the criminal procedure law via CDT, including the latest cartoon in Hexie Farm’s CDT series.

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Post tags: Chen Jieren, Chinese Human Rights Defenders, Chongqing, criminal procedure law, human rights watch, illegal detentions, leadership transition, legal reform, NPC, pu zhiqiang, rule of law, Wang Lijun
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“Some courts have not done well in improving transparency of court affairs and promoting a democratic judicial system,” Wang said in delivering the report to an audience that included China’s top leaders.

This year, the Supreme Court will work to reform court procedures to speed up proceedings of civil cases involving small sums of money, and improve rules allowing citizens to observe trials, he said.

Wang said courts should make more efforts in accepting supervision from the general public, including soliciting opinions from the public and giving more heed to media reports.

In the same address, Wang also claimed that China has convicted over 1 million people in 2011 in order to punish crimes and maintain a stable environment. Xinhua adds:

The courts concluded 840,000 criminal cases in 2011, up 7.7 percent from 2010, said the report on the work of the Supreme People’s Court, delivered by chief justice Wang Shengjun at a meeting of the ongoing annual parliamentary session.

Of the convicted, some 105,000 were found guilty of serious crimes such as homicide, kidnapping, robbery, planting bombs, organizing mafia-like gangs and human trafficking, involving 69,000 cases, the report said.

Another 29,000 criminals in 27,000 cases were punished for embezzlement, bribery and malfeasance, the report said.

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Reports that the “disappearance clause” has been struck out of the Criminal Procedure Law are premature. The battle is still raging on.

— Nicholas Bequelin 林伟 (@Bequelin) February 28, 2012

Bequelin describes this battle and its participants in greater detail in a New York Times op-ed:

The more progressive-minded factions of the Communist Party and the government consider legal reforms to be integral to China’s modernization. They see enlightened self-interest in giving a greater role to the rule of law, and reforming the criminal code to offer due-process rights that resemble international norms is a key part of this effort.

The other camp is made up of the powerful security apparatus and the more conservative and hard-line elements in the party and the government. This faction has become increasingly powerful since it was assigned the leading role for the security of the 2008 Beijing Olympics ….

Both camps have made their mark on the draft of the new criminal-procedure law ….

The rise of the national security faction is one of the most foreboding trends in China. Whether Article 73 is adopted or not will signal a great deal about whether China is making progress toward the rule of law or solidifying the supremacy of the security state.

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Chen [Guangzhong, honorary chairman of the China Legal Society] told AFP the latest draft of the law — to be voted on during the NPC’s session — now rules that police inform family members of the whereabouts of suspects arrested or placed under residential surveillance within 24 hours.

“This is a new breakthrough in the amendment and is an added safeguard for human rights. The draft should now have no problem in passing — there is an over 90 percent chance it will pass,” he told AFP.

But he cautioned that in the case of criminal detentions — legally different to arrests — police have been given a longer period of 37 days to inform families, if such a notification impedes their investigation.

Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, told AFP “numerous (China-based) diplomatic sources” also told him Chinese officials had informed them the clauses would be removed.

“But I am quite skeptical about this mainly because they have refused to publish the draft amendment. The fact they are not disclosing the draft is an indication that it is still not settled,” he said.

Siweiluozi appeared more, though cautiously, optimistic:

Though I don’t have any way of confirming this independently, I consider Professor Chen to be a credible source. If he’s right and this reflects the wording of the final draft for submission to the NPC, I would have to conclude that this issue has been relatively settled among the stakeholders at this late stage—publication of the draft is not the relevant indicator, in my opinion ….

The result of all this appears to leave a “disappearance” clause in the provision on criminal detention. Detaining someone for 37 days without notifying anyone is still quite problematic, but 37 days is considerably shorter than six months and at least detentions of this type will have to take place within the (relatively) predictable confines of a detention center. Also, depending on the final wording, it’s very likely that, compared to current law, the revision will place substantial limits on the types of cases for which this kind of detention can be used.

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Among their most critical findings is that the relationship between prosecutors and judges tends to be so close that there is “little space for lawyers to work within.” More basically, a judge is quoted as saying, “the police, the judge and the prosecutor are in one family ….”

The interviews found that some participants in the system would prefer a higher level of legality. Ultimately, however, criminal justice is “a process within a system, a Party-centered system which demands certainty of outcome (conviction).”

The authors write that despite “traces of due process,” the value system allows exceptions that violate the law. Violations of the law have become “systematic and entrenched… they have also become internalized… the rules to be followed are quite different from the rules in the formal rules” of the Criminal Procedure Law and merely changing legal rules would not improve rights and increase the reliability of the system. It would be necessary for the Party-state to “discard existing prejudices and adopt new and liberal values… ‘system reform’ not ‘law reform.’”

See also two previous posts by Lubman, via CDT: Laws on Paper vs. Law in Practice and A Glimpse into Chinese Law-Making.

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Against a backdrop of rapid socio-economic change and modernization, China continues to be an authoritarian one-party state that imposes sharp curbs on freedom of expression, association, and religion; openly rejects judicial independence and press freedom; and arbitrarily restricts and suppresses human rights defenders and organizations, often through extra-judicial measures.

The government also censors the internet; maintains highly repressive policies in ethnic minority areas such as Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia; systematically condones—with rare exceptions—abuses of power in the name of “social stability” ; and rejects domestic and international scrutiny of its human rights record as attempts to destabilize and impose “Western values” on the country. The security apparatus—hostile to liberalization and legal reform—seems to have steadily increased its power since the 2008 Beijing Olympics. China’s “social stability maintenance” expenses are now larger than its defense budget.

At the same time Chinese citizens are increasingly rights-conscious and challenging the authorities over livelihood issues, land seizures, forced evictions, abuses of power by corrupt cadres, discrimination, and economic inequalities. Official and scholarly statistics estimate that 250-500 protests occur per day; participants number from ten to tens of thousands. Internet users and reform-oriented media are aggressively pushing the boundaries of censorship, despite the risks of doing so, by advocating for the rule of law and transparency, exposing official wrong-doing, and calling for reforms.

China’s state media has responded to the report with a flurry of indignation, as HRW’s Nicholas Bequelin noted:

此地无银三百两： People’s Daily and China Daily have published a total of 10 (!) articles on Human Rights Watch (@hrw) in one week.

— Nicholas Bequelin 林伟 (@Bequelin) January 31, 2012

(“此地无银三百两”: “No 300 taels of silver here”; to draw attention to something by denying it.)

People’s Daily, for example, suggested that criticism of China’s rights record arose from Western insecurity:

It seems that some Western countries and NGOs have set out to attack China over its human rights issues. They first assume that human rights are being ignored, then seek evidence from rumors, and make speculations to blindly accuse China of violating human rights with the real purpose of distorting China’s international image ….

Why does the West still hold a prejudice against China’s human rights? The only reason is that the Cold War mentality and ideological hegemony still prevails. As long as China is a socialist country, the West will insist on distorting its image and see China as a threat to the Western system.

Since the end of the Cold War, the West has been too boastful of its political system, believing it is the only system that has universal value in the world.

China’s significant economic progress has stirred Western anxieties. Distorting China’s human rights becomes the only political choice.

Elsewhere, People’s Daily also criticised the report for failing to acknowledge China’s progress in legal reform. From Xinhua:

The World Report “gave no word on the great progress in terms of China’s judicial reforms that have been demonstrated in the Criminal Procedural Law draft amendment,” the article said.

Legal experts say the draft amendment will help improve the protection of criminal suspects’ human rights, by preventing judges from accepting confessions from tortured suspects and giving these suspects more defense options.

In fact, the report does acknowledge the amendment, but reiterates concern at the prospect of legalised enforced disappearances:

In August 2011, in an effort to … improve the administration of justice, the government published new rules to eliminate unlawfully obtained evidence and strengthened the procedural rights of the defense in its draft revisions to the Criminal Procedure Law. It is likely it will be adopted in March 2012.

However, the draft revisions also introduced an alarming provision that would effectively legalize enforced disappearances by allowing police to secretly detain suspects for up to six months at a location of their choice in “state security, terrorism and major corruption cases.” The measure would put suspects at great risk of torture while giving the government justification for the “disappearance” of dissidents and activists in the future. Adoption of this measure—which is hotly criticized in Chinese media by human rights lawyers, activists, and part of the legal community—would significantly deviate from China’s previous stance of gradual convergence with international norms on administering justice, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which China signed in 1997 but has yet to ratify.

See more on CDT.

People’s Daily also objected to the report’s claim that “the government continues to build a ‘new socialist countryside’ [in Tibet] by relocating and rehousing up to 80 percent of the TAR population, including all pastoralists and nomads.” From Xinhua:

The People’s Daily article, jointly published by two Tibet experts, said the HRW’s conclusion was groundless and contradictory to basic facts.

The two authors, Zhang Ming, or Lorong Dramadul, with the China Tibetology Research Center, and Professor Yang Minghong with Sichuan University, hoped that their experiences and observations from over 20 years of field research in Tibet could help clarify the misunderstandings.

They cited official statistics and said that in 2011, 1.85 million Tibetans, or 61 percent of the total population, had settled in permanent residences.

“No more than 150,000 people, or less than 5 percent of the Tibetan population, had left their original residence,” the experts wrote.

Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher Pan Xizhe’s op-ed at China Daily accused Human Rights Watch of sloppy methodology and political motivations:

At first glance, Human Rights Watch appears to be keen on the protection of international human rights. But it actually carries out its work with double standards and bias. Its observations lack political neutrality and its research methods are questionable. The organization’s employment of unqualified workers has also hurt the credibility of its report. Human Rights Watch should reflect inward before passing on judgment to others.

The media and international observers have long criticized Human Rights Watch for passing judgment of human rights conditions of a country or region through tinted lens. It turns a blind eye to human rights issues in some countries while criticizing others vehemently. The Sunday Times quoted a human rights insider in the United States as saying that the organization caters its reports to the US government, which greatly affects its objectivity ….

In the China portion of its report, Human Rights Watch used expressions such as “estimate”, “possibly”, and “probably”. It criticized China’s judiciary system, religious institutions, regional autonomy by ethnic groups, family planning policy as well as foreign and economic policies.

The US section of the report, which criticises the Obama White House’s failure to pursue Bush administration officials for approving the use of torture and decries America’s “abusive” counterterrorism policies, growing poverty and world-leading prison population, can be read here.

While the World Report looked back at 2011, at The Diplomat, HRW’s Phelim Kine looks ahead to 2012:

These cases represent more than the Chinese government’s well-documented contempt for freedom of expression explicitly guaranteed in Article 35 of the Constitution. They are also clear efforts to breed fear and sow silence among China’s beleaguered community of human rights defenders and civil society activists. The aim: to ensure that the 12-month senior Communist Party leadership transition this year proceeds without public challenges to the Party’s 61-year monopoly on power. China’s President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao are preparing to step aside for a new generation of leaders, widely touted to be Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang, in a secretive political succession that won’t be complete until in March 2013 ….

The government’s overriding obsession with maintaining its monopoly on power make it likely that these abuses will continue under the leadership of Xi Jinping. Foreign governments could help reverse this trend and give support to Chinese who want a more accountable government by more vigorously engaging the government on such violations. Thirty years since the launch of China’s economic reform and opening, a decade after China entered the World Trade Organization, and five years since the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the deterioration in respect for human rights and rule of law in China should be of serious concern for all countries seeking long-term, sustainable and mutually-beneficial bilateral relations with China.

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Does the Wukan case indeed mean that central- and local-level officials will henceforward lean toward relatively conciliatory and non-violent means to tackle protests by peasants and other disaffected elements in society? At least on the surface, Wang Yang’s handling of Wukan has won the support of the state media. The People’s Daily hailed Guangzhou’s efforts as an example of “accommodating and defusing contradictions and conflicts in a good way.” It praised Guangdong leaders for “grasping well the aspirations of the masses.” The commentary noted whether officials could satisfactorily resolve questions regarding the masses’ malcontents was a “yardstick of cadres’ ties with the people as well as their leadership ability.” The Global Times praised Guangdong leaders for “putting the interests of the public in the first place when handling land disputes” (People’s Daily, December 22, 2011; Global Times [Beijing], December 22, 2011; Bloomberg, December 22, 2011). The Wukan model also won plaudits from members of the remnant liberal wing of the party, a reference to the followers of radical, pro-West modernizers represented by the late party secretaries Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang. “I hope that the Wukan incident can push society to establish a system which is based on democracy and the rule of law,” said Hu Deping, the respected son of Hu Yaobang, “I hope that when we are faced with similar problems in the future, we can resort to the rule of law and negotiation” (South China Morning Post, December 30, 2011; Sina.com, December 30, 2011).

The Wukan protests, as noted last week by Chinese author Yu Hua, demonstrated a bilateral lack of faith in China’s legal system and a preference for administrative actions and political arrangements to maintain stability in the face of complaints. Protests are also the most effective tool for China’s ordinary citizens to get things done, The Diplomat’s David Cohen observed last week. Still, recent high-profile comments from suggest that the events in Wukan struck a chord inside the party. China legal expert Stanley Lubman writes in The Wall Street Journal about a “provocative” commentary about Wukan from within the CCP, posted to an online forum by CCP history magazine editor Wu Si:

Wu offers no sure path to attain the goal he advocates, but his conclusion is most dramatic: “To solve problems with civil rights and the rule of law in mind, there must be a paradigm shift for cadres,” who need to change the way the way they “mediate crises.” In solving social conflicts, he writes, new ways of thought “will open a new road” for Chinese society.

Invocation of the rule of law has been a ritual for some years in China, but it is usually only activists and law reformers who are willing to suggest it is an entirely distinctive approach to ordering society. The call for a “paradigm” change in a party magazine suggests something more radical than the usual slogans and formulas.

Some Western observers, including this writer, have tried to incorporate into their analyses of Chinese law the idea of “legal culture” — the way people in a society, from top to bottom, think about where law comes from, its aims and its methods. That is what Wu Si touches on when he suggests that cadres rethink about how they address social conflict. He is proposing that in practice they consciously place a much greater reliance on law and on legal institutions, which could become “a force for reform” leading to “systemic changes.”

See also CDT coverage of the original text and English translation of Wu Si’s comments, as well as the commentary from Hu Deping.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: chinese communist party, Guangdong, Hu Deping, hu yaobang, Internet forum, legal reform, online public opinion, rule of law, Wang Yang, Wukan, Zhao Ziyang
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