China’s Xi pushes overhaul to boost state legal power
FOR six decades, Chinese leaders have tried to put in place a sweeping civil code to explain the law on some of China’s most contentious issues, including property rights, migrant workers, defamation and divorce.
And for six decades, they have failed, stymied by political squabbling and social upheaval and leaving China with a piecemeal and outdated legal system.
Now, President Xi Jinping is reviving the idea of a national civil code as he seeks to remake China’s justice system. His government has embraced the code as a tool to fight corruption and fickleness in the courts, as well as to formalise state power on issues as varied as free speech and parental responsibility.
“Even while engaging in terrific repression in some respects, there is a desire to show continuing legal progress,” said Jerome A Cohen, a New York University expert on Chinese law.
On Wednesday, the Chinese legisla- ture, a rubber-stamp body of Xi and the ruling Communist Party, took a first step toward adopting a civil code, overwhelmingly approving a set of guiding principles and vowing to finish a complete code by 2020.
But to succeed, Xi and lawmakers will need to overcome significant ideological divisions within the party, especially on heated issues like how to handle land disputes.
China’s government often tries to present the image of a unified and efficient bureaucracy marching in step. But the struggle over the civil code is a reminder that it remains divided on a range of ideological and policy issues, complicating the leadership’s efforts to meet rising public expectations.
China’s leaders also face resistance from activists and rights-minded scholars, who dismiss the civil code as nothing more than window dressing and a means for Xi, who has pushed hard-line policies during his more than four years in power, to restrict free speech in China further.
Critics cite as a worrying sign the decision by lawmakers, during the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress this month in Beijing, to make the defamation of communist heroes and martyrs a civil offence.
“Will other citizens’ rights be protected as well?” asked He Weifang, a professor of law at Peking University and a prominent critic of the Communist Party. “This is a really bad move and has violated the basic spirit of civil laws, which champion dignity, personal freedom and equality.”
Zhou Guangquan, a lawmaker and a professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, dismissed concerns that the government was not interested in protecting individual rights. He said it was essential to update China’s civil law, which has its roots in German law and was last significantly revised in the 1980s, before the country’s economic and social transformations.
“There are a lot of overlaps and contradictions,” Zhou wrote in an email. “The passing of civil code will erase these problems.”
One of the chief issues is the ques- tion of how to resolve land disputes between residents and the government, a continuing source of social unrest. In China, homeowners have rights to their dwelling but not the ground underneath it.
Previous efforts to pass a civil code failed, but experts said that the fact that Xi and the party appear to have embraced the push to draft a code was a sign that this time, the effort is likely to bear fruit.