Opinion Law and disorder in China

Law in China,at least on paper,is more firmly established than it once was,and some legal experts propose doing away with the grievance system. But the government has retained it. Also — and crucially — it wants to leave the petitioners some slender hope,a fantasy that one day injustice will find redress. If all hope is lost,petitioners may take more extreme action.

Often,the State Bureau for Letters and Visits simply goes through the motions of registering the complaints,then asks the petitioners’ local governments to look into them. But years of failure have sharpened the petitioners’ wits. They know that the only way they can put pressure on their local governments is by persistent visits to Beijing.

Seeing the judiciary as biased and the grievance process as a sham,they treat petitioning as a means of extortion. Here’s an example. In 2007,during the Chinese Communist Party’s 17th Congress,a man from Shandong Province phoned his village chief and told him he was in Tianjin and about to board a train for Beijing to appeal a miscarriage of justice. The village chief was shocked: if the petitioner were to appear in Tiananmen Square at such a prominent moment,not only would the chief lose his job,but his immediate superiors would be disgraced as well. He begged the villager not to go to Beijing. All right,the man said,but there was a price for his acquiescence: 20,000 yuan. The village chief withdrew this sum from public funds and delivered it to the man’s wife.

The pay-off should not surprise us. Alarmed by worsening social unrest,government officials have adopted “stability maintenance” as a mantra — and a pretext to stifle protest. While the grievance process coexists politely with the regular legal system,the insistence on maintaining stability is,all too often,utterly at odds with it. After the collision of two high-speed trains near Wenzhou last July,relatives of those killed and injured rushed to the scene. Three days later,law offices in Wenzhou received a notice from the local judicial bureau and lawyers’ association: “The train collision is a major,sensitive incident that bears on social stability.” The notice directed lawyers to “immediately report” all requests for legal assistance and not to “respond to such requests without authorisation.” When the contents of this circular were revealed,an uproar ensued. The lawyers’ association took responsibility,saying it had issued the notice without judicial permission. But the lawyers’ association takes orders from the judiciary,so this apology was greeted on the Internet with derision.

The recent episode in Wukan,a village in southern China where residents staged an uprising that received international attention,reflected the uneven balance among the grievance process,the legal system and the insistence on stability. Local officials ignored complaints about corruption and then cracked down on the subsequent protests. The uproar was eventually resolved through political arrangements.

In China,an extramarital love interest who comes between a happy couple is known pejoratively as “Little Three.” The expression appears in a joke about three kindergarteners who want to play house. “I’ll be the daddy,” the boy says. “I’ll be the mommy,” one girl says. Another girl frowns: “I guess I’ll have to be Little Three.”

If the law,the grievance process and stability maintenance were ever to play house,I think we’d see the following exchange: “I’m the daddy,” Stability Maintenance says. “I’m the mommy,” Grievance Process says. The Law pouts. “Well,I’m Little Three.”

Yu Hua is the author of ‘China in Ten Words’