Author: Jerome Cohen, NYU

The most formidable challenge to China’s establishment of a credible ‘rule of law’ is neither the quality of its legislation nor the professional competence of its judges, prosecutors, lawyers and police. Laws and the skills of those who apply them have both witnessed substantial progress in the People’s Republic during the past three decades.

The real challenge to the administration of justice in China is, rather, the undue intrusion of politics and, even more broadly, of ‘guanxi’, the network of interpersonal relations of mutual protection, benefit and dependency that is one of the enduring hallmarks of Chinese society. Read more…

Author: Jerome A. Cohen and Yu-Jie Chen, NYU

The Chinese government’s continuing attacks on human rights lawyers rarely make foreign headlines these days. Monitoring, intimidating, disbarring and prosecuting activist lawyers have become routine in China. Even the tragic ‘disappearance’, while in police custody, of defence lawyer/political reformer Gao Zhishen, now feared to be dead, has hardly attracted attention. It is also unremarkable for even non-political Chinese defence lawyers to suffer sanctions. The recent conviction of Beijing lawyer Li Zhuang for allegedly counselling his client to lie and bribe witnesses would not have been noted abroad if the case had not involved Chongqing’s extraordinary campaign to suppress organised crime.

By contrast, the Taiwan government’s new interest in curbing vigorous defence lawyers does constitute ‘news’. Read more…

Author: Jerome A Cohen, NYU

In a bold reflection of their revolutionary zeal, when China’s Communists established the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, they totally rejected the legal regime of their Kuomintang predecessors that had been at least nominally grounded in European law. Sun Yat-sen had been more practical when he established the Republic of China after the 1911 Revolution. His new government decided to use what it could from the previous regime and benefit from the considerable Western-influenced law reform effort that had been made by the Manchu (Qing) dynasty for more than a decade before its collapse. Even Lenin opted for as much legal continuity as possible between the Czarist government and its Bolshevik successor, preferring to add socialist flourishes to the impressive pre-1917 Russian law codes that had been imported from Western Europe half a century earlier, deleting as necessary rather than starting from scratch.

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