It’s a historic mission: China’s lawyers are leading a campaign to create an independent legal system. For thousands of years China was ruled by personalities. What laws existed were never as important as the whim of the emperor or local officials. In imperial days, citizens suspected of crimes were summarily executed, their heads displayed on the city gates as warnings to others. Mao Zedong built on that tradition. During the Cultural Revolution he outlawed the Parliament with just a few words. Deng Xiaoping, himself a victim of Mao’s arbitrariness, stressed the importance of law, and the government has led a nationwide legal-education campaign. Says Jiang Ping, 65, a legal scholar: “We are moving away from a feudal system.” But the leaders want to make law without democracy–Jiang lost his law-school deanship in 1989 because he sympathized with the student movement and tried to use the Parliament to oppose martial law.
Reforms and international trade have prompted an explosion of new laws. About 200 private law firms have set up in Beijing since 1991, charging as much as $200 an hour. Not surprisingly, students are clamoring for admission to China’s handful of top law schools. Law is discussed on TV talk shows–and grumbled about by Beijing taxi drivers. Even delegates to China’s rubber-stamp Parliament are growing cocky with the idea that the law–not the Communist Party – should rule the land, and that they should have the power to create it.
The party still calls the shots. In fact, China’s leaders see the evolving body of law as a means of maintaining power and avoiding the chaos of the past. To build trust with the people, party leaders recently allowed the National People’s Congress to pass several statutes protecting civil liberties: the police can no longer detain people without charge for more than 30 days, and defendants have speedier access to lawyers. “There is now the presumption of innocence until proven guilty,” says Liu Yi, 32, a Canadian-educated lawyer. “This is a big step in terms of individual rights.”
The Chinese are learning how to use the law to protect their interests. Beijing University lawyers run a women’s hot line that receives 20-odd calls a day from women seeking help with divorce and domestic violence. “There is an enlightenment of rights going on,” says Ma Yinan, head of the Ford Foundation-funded program. “Women have been like sheep, very obedient. We encourage them to pursue their cases and grow stronger.” A new environmental organization, Friends of Nature, invoked environmental law to stop logging in Yunnan province and save the endangered golden monkey from extinction. The group’s founder, Liang Congjie, is fighting a plan to build a skyscraper near Tiananmen Square on the ground that it breaks zoning laws.
And a few Chinese have discovered that the law can make them famous. Wang Hai, a twentysomething worker, has become a Chinese-style Ralph Nader, exposing counterfeit products. The consumer-protection law requires businesses to compensate customers who are sold bogus goods, so Wang buys fakes in bulk, then forces stores to ante up. “We lawyers don’t think it’s the most commendable method,” says Li Changxu, 33, who heads a private company that investigates intellectual-property cases. “But he has made people feel that the law is there to protect their interests.”
How far China’s new legal fever will translate into political change remains to be seen. Citizens can now sue the government. But Beijing still invokes a law barring counterrevolutionary activity to send political opponents to jail. China’s top dissident, Wei Jingsheng, was sentenced to 14 more years in prison. “Rule of law? That’s a joke,” says Wang Hui, 33, who fought to get her husband, locked up for printing pro-worker T shirts and promoting workers’ rights, out of a labor re-education camp. Wang lost her appeal; she was detained twice and held without charge for three months.
Legal experts and activists hope the new civil-liberties protections may make such abuses less common. “These changes won’t help Wei Jingsheng–he’s off the charts,” says Michael Dowdle, a New York University law professor studying constitutional development in Beijing. “But the next generation’s Wei Jingsheng, perhaps he will get the benefit.” China’s lawyers aren’t waiting. They are zipping around town in BMWs, talking on mobile phones, putting justice to work.
