Author: Peter Yuan Cai, ANU

The 2009 arrest of Rio Tinto executive Stern Hu was a watershed event in the Sino-Australian relationship. Beijing’s unexpected intervention in the name of national security demonstrates not only how grave were perceptions of its disadvantage in the iron ore trade but also the murkiness of its laws regarding state secrets and the operation of the market. Determined intrusion from Beijing, especially by the Chinese intelligence services, could only happen with the blessing of top echelons of China’s political process.

But what could have made the Chinese government take such dramatic action at such a highly sensitive time in the iron ore negotiations and given the broader global ramifications that an intervention like this would inevitably have? Read the rest of this entry »

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 the rest of this entry »

Author: Kam Wing Chan, University of Washington

Yes it’s true – hukou (household registration) reform is again back in vogue in China’s ‘post-crisis’ conversations. Premier Wen Jiabao has been talking about it and, unusually the catch phrase has also been placed in the first ‘Central Document’ of 2010. Following the lead of these two sources, hundreds of newspaper articles and commentaries have opined on it in the last few weeks. On March 1, 13 big-city newspapers from 11 provinces in China also made a rare joint appeal for accelerating reform of the hukou system in a co-signed editorial. In sum, the issue is firmly in the spotlight, and hopes have been raised for some real hukou reform.

The hukou system is a big deal in the People’s Republic.  For the past 52 years, the system has served to segregate the rural and the urban populations, initially in geographical terms, but more fundamentally, in social, economic and political terms. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Sandy Gordon, ANU

While no reasonable person would shed too many tears for the passing of the Tamil Tigers (except for the number of civilian deaths involved), we should, perhaps, shed some tears for Sri Lanka itself.

A generation ago, Sri Lanka had an ambition to become another ‘Asian Tiger’.  And it had every prospect of so doing had not the vicious civil war intervened. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Peter Yuan Cai, ANU

The Hollywood blockbuster Avatar is breaking box-office records in China and cinemagoers have been treated to a visual feast from the Shangrila-like moon of Pandora. At the same time, the savagery depicted in the film about the demolition of the natives’ home has also resonated with the Chinese. A young literary commentator wrote that ‘For audiences from other places, barbaric eviction is something they simply can’t imagine – it is the sort of thing that could only happen in outer space and China.’

Much like the Na’vi people from Pandora, forcibly evicted Chinese residents have fought back literally, with bows and arrows and Molotov cocktails against camouflaged hired thugs from real estate developers. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Ann Kent, ANU

Over the last six months, Australia has been undergoing a sharp learning curve in its relations with China. This has come about courtesy of China’s detention on 5 July 2009 of Rio Tinto executive, former Chinese national, and now Australian citizen, Stern Hu, together with his three colleagues, Liu Caikui, Ge Minqiang and Wang Yong, all Chinese nationals. Aside from the shock the Hu case has represented to most Australians — accustomed since the 1980s to viewing China as a relatively benign presence in our region — the main lesson has been that China’s version of the rule of law is quite different from Australia’s and that that version may also, in times of stress, impact on our own society.

The first and most important part of this unwelcome lesson has been that China’s is not so much a rule of law as a rule by law. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Ernest Z. Bower, CSIS

For anyone watching Malaysian politics over the last five years, the message is clear – people want their political system to move on to represent a modern Malaysia and more sophisticated electorate. The old ways and anachronistic political structures, as well as some of the personalities that have become inextricably identified with those structures, are being encouraged by fed-up voters to make way for new politics.

This week has seen the start of the second trial of former Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the opposition Pakatan Rakyat Party (PKR), Anwar Ibrahim. Read the rest of this entry »

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 the rest of this entry »

Author: Amrita Malhi, ANU

Since Friday 8 January, arsonists and vandals have attacked ten churches around Malaysia. Four arson attempts took place on the same morning, following the conclusion of a two-year case before Malaysian courts, over whether non-Muslims can be prevented from using the term ‘Allah’ to describe God in the Malay language.

In 2007, the Home Ministry banned the term in the Catholic Herald newspaper, arguing it could confuse Muslims and cause offence, threatening national security. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Nicholas Farrelly, New Mandala, ANU

In Thailand the number ‘nine’ is usually considered the most auspicious. It is associated with the reigning monarch, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the ninth king of the Chakri dynasty. Spoken in Thai, it also sounds like a word for ‘progress’ (kaew). 9, 99, 999, et cetera, are regarded with special reverence: luck and good fortune are denominated in 9s.

So the year 2009 was, for that simple reason, greeted with a modest degree of optimism by many Thais. Of course, in their Buddhist calendar, it is merely 2552. Indeed, it has, in the final reckoning, proven an inauspicious time. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Peter Van Ness, ANU

On Christmas Day, Liu Xiaobo, China’s most prominent political activist, was sentenced to 11 years in prison for ‘incitement to subvert state power.’ A former professor of literature at Beijing Normal University, Liu was jailed for 21 months after the June 1989 Tiananmen massacre and, in 1996, sentenced to reform through labour for an additional three years. He was detained again last year until his current conviction. Liu Xiaobo and Zhang Zhuhua are two of the main authors of Charter 08, published last year on December 10, on the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

China’s Charter 08 is a detailed statement of principle, inspired by Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77. Charter 08 calls for China to endorse the ‘basic universal values’ of freedom, human rights, equality, republicanism, democracy, and constitutional rule.  Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Sandra Tarte, University of the South Pacific

In 2009, the political realities in Fiji became more clearly defined, but increasingly perplexing for its regional neighbors and development partners.

The moment of truth for the country, and for Commodore Frank Bainimarama’s military-backed government, came on 9 April when Fiji’s Court of Appeal ruled that the December 2006 coup and the interim administration it installed were illegal. This ruling removed the already somewhat tenuous constitutional basis upon which the interim government had previously claimed its political mandate. It was also the catalyst for the abrogation, one day later, of the Constitution by the President, and the declaration of a ‘new legal order’ under which the Bainimarama-led administration was reappointed. This development clearly indicated to all that there would be no turning back to the pre-December 2006 order. It also marked the further consolidation and entrenchment of the military-backed regime – a process that is likely to continue throughout 2010. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Matthew Zagor, ANU

For several weeks in October and early November, Australian politics was dominated not by the economy or climate change, but by the conduct and fate of 78 Sri Lankan asylum-seekers aboard an Australian customs vessel, Oceanic Viking, outside the port of Tanjung Pinang in Indonesia. The incident exposed some of the fissures in international refugee law, as well as Australia’s uneasy relationship with those who arrive by boat.

Rescued in Indonesian waters by an Australian vessel at the request of the Indonesian authorities, the asylum-seekers refused to disembark until certain demands were met concerning their conditions of detention and expedited resettlement. Coming on top of a spike in boat arrivals in Australia, the incident presented a test of the Prime Minister’s stated policy of being ‘tough but humane’. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Peter Yuan Cai, ANU and Tsinghua

The Chinese press has been saturated recently with the coverage of a sensational trial in the mountainous mega-city of Chongqing, where hundreds of gangsters and corrupt officials have been brought before the dock to face the music. The trial has all the elements of a Hollywood blockbuster: sexual scandals involving dazzling starlets and brawny gigolos, a web of underground casinos, and the complicity of corrupt police officers. The powerful mayor of Chongqing, and a member of the politburo, Bo Xilai told the press that the activities of mafia were so rampant that they were left with no choice but to react.

According to official statistics released by authorities in Chongqing, 1544 gangsters have been detained and over 1.53 billion Yuan in illegal assets have been seized. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Stanley Lubman, Berkeley

China has come a long way in creating a legal system—and has a long way to go if the avowed aim of ‘ruling the country by law’ is to be realized. At the same time, considering that legal development has really been carried out for only half of the time that has elapsed since the founding of the People’s Republic, the accomplishments are considerable.

What remains in doubt is the depth of the commitment of the current Chinese leadership to further develop key institutions, and whether Chinese society will be stable enough to nourish those institutions.

Read the rest of this entry »