FANG JUE
NEW YORK, Aug. 9
Chen Liangyu, the disgraced former Communist Party secretary of Shanghai, has been expelled from the Party and turned over to judicial authorities for detention, a deputy secretary of the Party's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection announced late last month. Rather than a significant achievement in fighting corruption, this is a major violation of the rule of law.
China's Politburo had decided the previous week to turn Chen, who is accused of corruption, over to the judiciary. Later the Party carried out the decision. According to China's criminal law, only public security or national security officials are authorized to have a suspect interned, and only the State Procurator's Office is authorized to approve the arrest of a suspect. No other authority, organization or institution is authorized to send anyone to the judiciary for detention.
During the Cultural Revolution, anyone labeled a revolutionary or belonging to a rebel organization could send a counter-revolutionary to public security officials for detention. Sending someone for judicial detention is the modern version of this practice. Both are against the rule of law. In this respect, the Chinese Communist Party is keeping pace with the times.
Enough evidence has already emerged against Chen to warrant his arrest and detention by the proper authorities. Whether arrested by the procurator or taken into criminal detention by the public security department, a suspect is always investigated while in custody. However, the Politburo insisted on first conducting its own investigation of Chen, under the Party's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. From the time Chen's case was "put on record" last September until he was sent to judicial detention in July, it took 10 months.
This raises the question: Did the Politburo and the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection obstruct justice?
Under China's system of "socialism with Chinese characteristics," senior officials are not subject to the rule of law. If a top official is suspected of corruption, he is first "investigated" by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, after which the Politburo will decide whether or not to turn him over to the judiciary for trial. In effect, high-level officials of the Communist Party enjoy the ancient privilege of being held above the law, even in this new age of "socialist modernization."
The Politburo and the commission aim to maintain the stability of one-party rule under the Communist Party. They consider the balance of power between factions within the Party before deciding how to handle high-level corruption cases. They decide which details of the alleged crime to expose and what to release to the public, and they control the verdict of the court.
Under this system, many high-level officials guilty of serious corruption have been sheltered, many facts have been covered up, and the majority of suspects have enjoyed delayed investigations. This is a major reason why there are more corrupt personnel and more serious corruption cases among high-level officials in the Chinese Communist Party.
The Party's Discipline Inspection Commissions at various levels came into being in December 1978. From birth they were allergic to the rule of law: they attempted to change the treatment Party officials would receive when accused of a crime by allowing the Party, rather than the judicial system, to handle their cases. Over the past 30 years, the Party has become more and more corrupt, which shows that the inspection committees are not serving their purpose. As Deng Xiaoping said, we must "seek truth from facts."
To curb and clear up corruption, we should eliminate all levels of Discipline Inspection Commissions and let the judiciary conduct all investigations and trials of suspects, including high-level officials. To achieve this, we must also eliminate another body that obstructs the rule of law -- all levels of Political and Law Committees. If these committees continue to manipulate China's public security and national security departments and supervise procurators, lawyers and courts, they will inherit the present role of the Commissions for Discipline Inspection, and continue sheltering, covering up and silently approving corruption.
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(Fang Jue is a political activist and freelance writer living in the United States. He was a former government official in China and worked in the Politics Research Institute of China's Academy of Social Sciences. He was a visiting scholar at the Fairbanks Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University in 2003. This article is translated and edited from the Chinese by UPI Asia Online; the original can be found at www.ncn.org . ©Copyright Fang Jue.)
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