As Fourth Plenum legal reforms promise to increase citizens’ powers to sue the authorities, NPR’s Anthony Kuhn describes one legal battle already underway between customs officials and the daughter of a former secretary to Mao Zedong. Li Nanyang is challenging the unexplained confiscation of 53 copies of her father’s memoir at Beijing airport last year.
“My husband and son-in-law cleared customs smoothly,” she says. “Then customs opened my daughter’s suitcase. They found a dozen or so books. They hauled the rest of us who had cleared customs back in and confiscated all our books.”
Li says the customs officers couldn’t say why they were impounding the books.
[…] Li Nanyang’s lawyer, Xia Nan, says that customs must explain its legal basis for confiscating his client’s books.
“We are not clear whether they have a blacklist of banned books, or some sort of ad hoc process,” he says. “We hope customs can make this procedure public during the trial.” [Source]
Read more about China’s legal reforms via CDT.
