China's Great Leap Backward

August 28, 2006
The Wall Street Journal
Original source: http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB115671371621346721.html
In most countries, a blind social activist who taught himself law to fight for the rights of the disabled and other victims of abuse would be treated as a hero, and feted with all kinds of rewards. Especially if he courageously exposed forced abortions and sterilizations that even the government agrees are against the law.
But, in China, Chen Guangcheng's reward for doing this is prison. He was sentenced to four years and three months Thursday, on trumped up charges of gathering a crowd to disrupt traffic and damaging $680 worth of government property. That Mr. Chen was under house arrest at the time these crimes allegedly occurred didn't seem to trouble the court. Not that there was anyone to raise this point during the two-hour hearing. Three lawyers who sought to defend the blind activist were detained by local police in the northeast Chinese province of Shandong, and accused of stealing a wallet. Instead the judge simply announced that Mr. Chen's silence during the trial amounted to an admission of guilt.
His case is one of several in recent days that highlight how -- despite China's impressive progress in the economic arena, and its repeated claims to be building a fairer legal system -- in the area of law Beijing has taken a great leap backward.
On Friday, Chinese journalist Zhao Yan was sentenced to three years in jail on dubious charges of fraud. Had he not worked for a U.S. newspaper, his sentence would probably have been even harsher. A researcher for the Beijing bureau of the New York Times, Mr. Zhao was detained two years ago on charges of leaking state secrets after a story in the Times revealed that former President Jiang Zemin was about to step down as China's military chief.
The Times has repeatedly denied that Mr. Zhao was involved in this story; and prosecutors didn't produce evidence that the report fit even China's elastic definition of state secrets. Lack of evidence doesn't normally bother Chinese courts. But after U.S. President George W. Bush twice raised Mr. Zhao's case with Chinese President Hu Jintao, Beijing had to be a bit more careful. So it let the state-secrets charges fail, and dug up an unrelated five-year-old fraud charge as an excuse to avoid setting Mr. Zhao free.
Meanwhile Ching Cheong, Hong Kong correspondent for Singapore's Straits Times, is still waiting to hear his fate after a secret trial two weeks ago, again on charges of leaking state secrets. Mr. Ching also ran foul of China's sensitivities over its previous leaders. He was detained last year while trying to collect a manuscript containing interviews with the late reformist leader Zhao Ziyang, who sided with the student demonstrators in the 1989 Tiananmen protests. Hong Kong and Singapore have been far more reticent in raising his case than the Bush administration was over Mr. Zhao. His supporters fear Mr. Ching will suffer more severely as a result.
Terrible though Messrs. Zhao and Ching's cases are, Mr. Chen's is perhaps the most tragic of all. He was guilty of doing no more than what Beijing has repeatedly urged its disgruntled citizens to do: seeking to use the country's embryonic legal system to tackle the abuses committed by local cadres. After years of helping disabled people win cases against local-government agencies, Mr. Chen last year brought a lawsuit on behalf of the victims of sterilizations and forced abortions inflicted by population-control officials in Shandong's Linyi City. Although China still has a one-child policy, both of those practices are now officially illegal. Some officials in Linyi responsible for forced sterilizations and abortions were sacked after Mr. Chen's lawsuit prompted an investigation by Beijing.
But none of this was enough to save the blind activist when local officials took their revenge. He was detained, beaten and ultimately imprisoned. Beijing police even looked the other way as Mr. Chen was abducted from under their noses by Shandong officials. That fits into a recent pattern in which the Chinese leadership has repeatedly sided with corrupt local officials against their accusers.
Beijing claims to be determined to stamp out the abuses that continue at a local level all over China. But its own actions, in cases such as Messrs. Zhao and Ching, undermine its pretence to be committed to the rule of law. And as Mr. Chen has now discovered to his cost, even in the case of the most flagrant abuses -- Beijing still sides with the interests of party officials rather than the people.