Stanley Lubman, long-time specialist on Chinese law, writes on police illegality for the Wall Street Journal’s China Real Time Report:
The manifestations of police illegality are pervasive examples of a failure in Chinese governance. For example, local public security bureaus often exercise discretion to exceed personnel quotas set in Beijing, sometimes by hiring private security companies. They frequently generate revenue illegitimately to make up for deficiencies in central financing by engaging in predatory collection of fines. Moreover, because central monitoring of public security is dominated by the local bureaus, incentives to report “faithfully” to Beijing are not strong. These are only illustrative — other examples abound.
How could this system of decentralized power over public security evolve? Tanner and Green conclude that rather than a “nationally uniform pattern” there will be “a variety of local patterns.” In many localities institutions conducive to the rule of law are not likely to appear. Although there may be “pockets” of “relative legality” in some large, relatively prosperous cities, “in localities where a small tight elite of Party leaders and local entrepreneurs collaborate to dominate state and economy,“ police and semiprivate “security companies” are emerging as “repressive, anti-labor” agents. They also suggest that in some areas alliances between police and criminal elements might be formed, as has happened in a few places such as coastal Fujian and Yunnan.
