ABSTRACT
Political reform in China came to a virtual halt with the gunshots on Tiananmen Square 20 years ago. The threads of liberalisation begun by former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) general secretaries Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang have not been picked up by their successors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. Party elders, including Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun, and Wang Zhen, saw in the ‘1989 turmoil’ a collusive effort by ‘bourgeois-liberal elements’ among China’s intellectuals and cadres as well as ‘anti-Chinese forces in the West’ to topple the CCP regime. It is therefore not surprising that after mid-1989, the leadership has made stability, especially snuffing out dissent and other challenges to the regime, the party’s foremost task. Perhaps the most tangible result of reform in the 1980s – separation of party and
government, in addition to some degree of truncation of the Party’s administrative powers – has been rolled back with a vengeance. Indeed, the CCP has, since mid1989, concentrated more power than ever in the Party Central Committee, and especially in the Politburo and its Standing Committee.2 Top priority has been given to ensuring that the Party is in control of the ‘tools of democratic proletarian dictatorship,’ with the goal of safeguarding the CCP’s monopoly on power. The Party’s penchant for control has been exacerbated by the series of ‘colour revolutions’ (or ‘velvet revolutions’) that took place in central Asian countries such as Georgia and the Ukraine, and most recently in 2005, in Kyrgyzstan, which shares a border with China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region.3 Apart from beefing up the ‘pillars of proletarian dictatorship’ such as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the People’s Armed Police (PAP), the party leadership has been putting more emphasis on judicial and legal weapons to defuse threats to the status quo and to maintain the CCP’s ‘perennial ruling-party status.’ This paper will look at how the CCP has boosted political control over law-
enforcement and judicial organs – especially the courts and the procuratorates. Given that China has some 190,000 judges, 160,000 procurators, 150,000 lawyers and hundreds of thousands of legal specialists, the so-called zhengfa (‘political and legal’) machinery could become a fierce juggernaut against perceived enemies of
the party and state.4 Particular emphasis will be placed on developments since Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao took over the leadership at the 16th CCP Congress in 2002. Despite the Hu-Wen team’s protestations about their commitment to yifazhiguo or ‘administering the country according to law,’ the Party has tightened its grip over the gongjianfa (the police, procuratorates, and courts) apparatus through means including investing more authority in the secretive Central Commission for Political and Legal Affairs. More apparatchiks, rather than legal professionals, have been appointed to senior posts. And the imperative of maintaining the CCP’s monopoly on power seems to have taken precedence over the sanctity of the Constitution and the law. This paper will also examine how the politicisation of the judicial system has hurt the interests of the masses and adversely affected the overall modernisation enterprise.
