Introduction

In 2004, there was a debate in the People's Republic of China (PRC) over the Letters and Visits System (xinfang zhidu), ¹ designed to allow people with complaints to register them with the upper levels of the government. Yu Jianrong, a sociologist in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who had compiled a “first report” on the system, argued that it had fatal flaws and should be eliminated. ² Yu's rationale was that the system had political as well as legal functions and hampered the effort to make the judicial system more independent of the administrative and political systems. This argument immediately drew much criticism from both officials and scholars across the country. Chen Shuangquan, vice chairman of the Legal Committee of the Sichuan People's Congress, contended that the letters and visits system had deep roots in the PRC political structure and could not be abolished just like that. Kang Xiaoguang, a political scientist at Qinghua University, specified that the letters and visits system was indispensable precisely because of the absence of any genuine judicial independence in China. ³ Ying Xing, a legal scholar at the Chinese University of Politics and Law in Beijing also defended the system. He argued that, given problems in the Administrative Litigation and Reconsideration systems, also designed to protect the rights of citizens, the letters and visits system remained an important alternative venue for people to lodge complaints against the abuses of local officials. ⁴