The_Economist_20141101_China
Politics
Rules of the party
A call to revive the country's constitution will not necessarily establish “rule of law”
Nov 1st 2014 | BEIJING | From the print edition
IN A lengthy document published on October 28th the Communist Party called for no less than an “extensive and profound revolution” in the way China is governed. This would involve establishing “rule of law” by 2020 and giving new emphasis to a long-neglected constitution which, among other things, enshrines freedom of speech and of the press. However, the party means far less by all this talk than might be imagined. President Xi Jinping is embroiled in a campaign to instil discipline in his corruption-riddled party. He hopes a blast of fresh rhetoric and some legal reforms will help curb official abuses of power and the anger they fuel. It is not his plan to reduce the party’s importance.
The nearly 17,000-character “resolution” was endorsed by the party’s 370-member Central Committee at an annual plenum five days earlier (pictured, above). Such documents are normally kept secret for a few days to allow lower-ranking party officials to digest them. The document, and the plenum itself, were striking. It was the first Central Commit tee meeting in the party’s history to focus on building “rule of law”, and it was the first time that the committee had given such a place of honour to the constitution. In the past the party has often preferred to keep quiet about it because of its
liberal-sounding clauses, including the stirring declaration that “the state respects and preserves human rights”.
The resolution declared that December 4th would henceforth be National Constitution Day, that officials would have to swear an oath of allegiance to the constitution, and that it would be promoted “throughout society”. Everyone, including party members and the armed forces, “must regard the constitution as the fundamental guideline of their activities”, the document says. Mr Xi had talked up the cons titution for a while after he took over as China’s leader late in 2012, but had appeared less eager after liberal intellectuals began speaking of the constitution as a way of checking the party’s power. Now he appears enthused again. The plenum ruled that all regulations which violate the constitution must be revised.
Mr Xi’s aim, however, is not to encourage the liberals. A decade ago the constitution was amended to include explicit protections for human rights and private property. Citizens with grievances briefly took heart and attempted to use these clauses to challenge official abuses of power. They were ignored, roughed up or arrested. Under Mr Xi, Chinese academics and journalists have been banned from expressing support for “constitutionalism”: a ter m that the party sees as a codeword for Western democratic values.
The Central Committee made clear the party had not changed its stance on this. “We absolutely cannot indiscriminately copy foreign rule-of-law concepts and models,” it said. Yang Xiaojun of China National School of Administration told People’s Daily Online, a party mouthpiece, that the party needed to “strengthen internal propaganda and education” to prevent any misunderstanding that the constitution was like a Western one.
Some legal schola rs believe there might be a change in the offing: the Supreme People’s Court, the country’s highest judicial body, could begin using the constitution to review lower-court rulings. But if so the aim would not be to protect civil liberties, but to give the central authorities more control over the legal system. People who independently challenge the party will continue to be punished harshly. Mr Xi, indeed, has presided over a sweeping crackdown on dissent since he came to power.
Mr Xi’s aim appears to be to use the constitution to rein in local officials whose routine flouting of the law causes public anger and many thousands of protests every year. By making them swear to uphold the constitution, he is trying to make clear that they are not above the law when it comes to such matters as property rights. He does not expect them to ignore restrictions on demonstrating; the party has never acknowledged a contradiction between such laws and the constitution’s guarantees.
The Central Committee said new types of courts would be set up that will cross several administrative regions; their judges, in theory, will not be so easily beholden to local officials. In addition, the party will now assess whether officials have interfered in legal cases when deciding on their prospects for promotion. Judges are to bear “lifelong responsibility” for their decisions in cases.
Official English translations refer to the importance of “rule of law”. But Mr Xi’s tactics appear better suited to a different translation of the Chinese term, yifa zhiguo: “rule by law”. His aim is to strengthen law to make the party more powerful, not to constrain it. Randy Peerenboom of La Trobe University in
Melbourne says Mr Xi’s measures seem intended to make China’s courts work better and more
consis tently, “more like [in] Singapore”—a country that Chinese officials sometimes hold up as a model of benign authoritarianism. But the fate of its own elite is to remain in the hands of the party. On October 28th Xinhua, an official news agency, said a former general, Xu Caihou, had confessed to bribe-taking and that legal proceedings against him had begun. This was only made possible by a decision in June to expel him from the party; members cannot stand trial. The plenum produced no news about the most high-profile target of Mr Xi’s anti-corruption campaign, Zhou Yongkang, a former chief of domestic security. Prosecutors will have to wait until the party issues its verdict.
Corruption in the housing market
To those that have
The bureaucrat’s house-price discount
Nov 1st 2014 | From the print edition
OFTEN the trickiest part of being a corrupt bureaucrat is not how to find new ways to extort money or accept bribes, but how to hide the ill-gotte n gains. No one wants to end up like “Uncle House”, as a district official in the southern province of Guangdong was dubbed by internet users. He was outed two years ago by online anti-corruption activists after acquiring 22 properties that on his salary he clearly could not afford.
However, research by Hanming Fang of the University of Pennsylvania, and Li-An Zhou and Quanlin Gu of the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University suggests that the housing market is a source of illicit riches, as well as a place to park them. The authors find that Chinese bureaucrats consistently pay less when buying houses, receiving on average a 1% discount.
The most likely explanation is that this is a form of bribe by property developers. Supporting this theory is the authors’ finding that officials who regulate property, and senior public servants, enjoy the biggest discounts. Those from provincial governments, for example, received a 4% reduction, roughly equivalent to two-thirds of their yearly salary.
The authors examined over 1m mortgage contracts, which contain detailed statistics on the applicant, such as his income and employer, and the house in question. They then compared the average price paid by bureaucrats with that paid by those in the private sector. These estimates probably underestimate the corruption as they do not cover houses purchased by the spouses or children of bureaucrats.
Until recently the property market seemed a one-way bet for corrupt and honest citizens alike. At their peak, house prices in some big cities were growing by 20% a year. But in recent years the market has been cooled by rules such as limits on the number of properties each citizen can buy and on the mortgage subsidies the state supplies. Prices are reported to have declined by 1.3% in September, marking the fifth consecutive monthly fall, suggesting that the restrictions may have worked too well. Keen to avoid a collapse, the government has begun to unwind some of the restrictions in second-tier cities.
For as yet unexposed “Uncle House” types, this may be a good time to clean up their portfolios. The furore over corrupt officials has prompted the government to introduce a property register. The hope is that will succeed in uncovering the full extent of illicit holdings and corruption. However, the register is to be implemented completely only by 2020, affording shady bureaucrats plenty of time to move their wealth into the shadows. China’s property market may indeed one day become transparent, but not so soon as to give officials moonlighting as speculators an immediate reason to panic.
The law at work
No more rooms
Against a network of officials and thugs, the law is no shield
Nov 1st 2014 | BEIJING | From the print edition
Mr Qiao’s last stand
FOR most of the past 70 years Qiao Shuzhi’s family supported the Communist Party, and the party took good care of the family. Mr Qiao’s father, an underground member during the war against Japan in the 1930s and 1940s, helped store and move military supplies. He was rewarded with a building in the Haidian district of north-western Beijing. In 1953 he turned it into the Tianyi Guesthouse, offering budget lodgings to travellers. Permission for the business was granted, in writi ng, by China’s police chief at the time.
In the 1960s, Mr Qiao says, Zhou Enlai, who was then prime minister, protected the guesthouse, allowing it to operate as the only private business in Beijing throughout the mayhem of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. When pro-market reforms began in the late 1970s the guesthouse was widely praised as a model family-run operation.
Now Mr Qiao, 64, has lost it all. He does not understand why the party, whose Central Committee has just met to extol the “rule of law”, cannot pr otect him from the developers and officials he accuses of grossly violating it. Wielding a sheaf of official papers that acknowledge his ownership of the building, Mr Qiao says he was abducted and held for 13 hours last December as the building was demolished by what he describes as a network of corrupt officials and developers. All of its contents were lost.
Mr Qiao’s story is far from unique. Since the mid-1990s, tens of millions of Chinese have lost their land. In many cases, only minimal compensation has been offered. Researchers believe that, of thousands of “mass incidents” of rural unrest occurring each year, the majority are about land. In one of the worst recent cases, nine people were killed in mid-October in Yunnan province in the south-west in a dispute over evictions.
In their campaign for redress, Mr Qiao and his son have been stymied at every turn. Local police did not respond when thugs broke the Qiaos’ windows. The electricity bureau did nothing when power to his building was cut. Planning officials scoffed at his request for adequate compensation for the loss of his business. The Qiaos informally approached a local court to assess their chances of suing the government successfully. They were given a brush-off.
Mr Qiao and his son dare not go back to their old street. They are paying a high rent in order to live near Zhongnanhai, the compound housing China’s leaders. They feel that at least they’ll be safer in a well-guarded neighbourhood.