Negative inc

China says no---the CP is perceived as “western infiltration”---hope for reform is nearly dead

[Han:] What are the dominant trends among the Chinese society’s reaction to the rights lawyers? Does the concept of ‘human rights’ carry much traction with the average Chinese?

[Pils:] I think that like in other countries we would need to differentiate between citizens who have confronted government abuse and rights violations, and those who have not. What rights lawyers have told me suggests that the people who form their usual clientele have become more rights-conscious over the past one or two decades. Several narratives from the late 1990s were about clients who didn’t know what ‘torture’ (xingxun bigong 刑讯逼供 or kuxing 酷刑) meant, for example; who might have no idea at all that the law prohibited beating criminal suspects. Today more ordinary people seem to be aware of their rights.

With regard to the wider population, I am not sure. Perhaps ‘human rights’ today carries as much traction with the average Chinese as it does with the average Briton or American; but how much is that? It is especially hard to tell in China, not only because the opportunities for research that might help answer this question are limited but also because of censorship and limited information available to Chinese citizens. The government censors media reporting bad news about itself. It has also publicly denounced rights lawyers and human rights themselves as tools of western infiltration under the name of ‘so-called universal values.’ But then again it continues to use ‘human rights’ in a positive way on some occasions. And, obviously the Internet has diversified the sources of information available to ordinary citizens. I imagine that Chinese citizens have been receiving mixed messages and it is not easy to figure out how they respond to that.

[Han:] How do you assess the progress of a top-down, controlled and incremental rule of law reform in China today? Do you see any hope for the reduction of repression in light of recent legislative reforms that have moved in the direction of increased liberalization? What about President Xi Jinping’s announcement to establish a “rule of law” by 2020?

[Pils:] The hope of incremental liberalization through top-down legal reforms was extremely important in the post-Mao era but today, in my view, it is very nearly dead. Under Xi Jinping especially, the law has been changed to accommodate rather than curb power abuses. Law is not seen as imposing limits on the power of the government; rather, it is an expression of the power of the ruling Party, including ruthless power to control its own bureaucracy. This is not to deny, of course, that there are occasional welcome changes, for example, the decision to abolish the feared “re-education through labor” system in 2013. But such changes generally look better on paper than in reality and do not address the central challenge of power abuse. For example, the government continues to lock people up under numerous forms of detention without due – or simply without any – legal process. The Party’s vision for 2020 is therefore Party rule by law, at best – legal rules used when it serves power-holders, and disregarded when it does not.

And, the Party keeps widening the circles of people it targets. It has turned on itself through the ‘anti-corruption’ campaign and it is going after more and more groups in civil society, treating human rights advocates, especially, as enemies. Starting with the detention of Lawyer Wang Yu, her husband and sixteen-year old son in the night of July 9, 2015, there has been an unprecedented crackdown on rights lawyers. Most recently, this widening crackdown has also affected labor activists; and repression is now expanding beyond China’s borders. It is a sad but apt illustration of the more repressive, dual-state system the leadership wants to create.