China's 'Justice' System

By Nicholas D. Kristof | The New York Times
June 18, 2006

With President Bush on the ropes, the most important person in the world right now may well be President Hu Jintao, as he presides over 1.3 billion people and the rise of China.

But while China is one of the great successes on the world scene, Mr. Hu increasingly looks like a loser.

He has disappointed many Chinese intellectuals and Communist Party officials with his Brezhnevian approach to political reform. Former President Jiang Zemin and former Prime Minister Zhu Rongji are among the party officials who are said by insiders to be unhappy with Mr. Hu's reign.

Mr. Hu has a brilliant mind and is pragmatic in economics and diplomacy, managing both well. But in politics he has been a throwback to the ideologues of the past (like his own patron, Song Ping), and he has attempted to tug China backward by clamping down on the news media, law, religion and the Internet.

China now imprisons some 32 journalists, more than any country in the world. A religious crackdown has led to underground Christians being arrested and sometimes tortured, particularly in rural areas. And China has tried harder than almost any country to neuter the Internet by filtering out obscene words like "human rights."

And yes, it is personal. I spent Friday outside the Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People's Court, as a New York Times colleague, Zhao Yan, was enduring a farcical secret trial on Mr. Hu's orders. Mr. Zhao, a researcher in The Times's Beijing bureau, has already been imprisoned virtually incommunicado for the last 22 months, and he may now face a decade or more in prison.

I was allowed into the courthouse by mistake — I drove through the gate with two colleagues, and nobody stopped us when we walked in — and it's a gorgeous building with more magnificent courtrooms than I've ever seen in the U.S. But the courthouse was mostly empty, and finally we found out why: people aren't allowed in the People's Court. A group of indignant plainclothes police officers swarmed in and herded us outside.

The courthouse is a perfect symbol of Mr. Hu's vision of China today: a dazzling building with lavish facilities, but empty in every sense. It's all infrastructure, no software. It's as if Mr. Hu thinks that building a modern judicial system is about high ceilings and padded seats rather than about laws and justice.

The trial was conducted in secret, and we didn't even get a glimpse of Mr. Zhao. The trial ended in one day without a single witness giving testimony for either side. The verdict will be handed down soon, and it's almost a foregone conclusion that Mr. Zhao will be sent to prison for a long sentence.

This case originally arose after Mr. Hu was irritated by a scoop by The Times's Beijing bureau chief, Joseph Kahn, and ordered that the leaker be punished. The State Security authorities couldn't find the real source, so they arrested Mr. Zhao instead because they didn't like his reporting about rural unrest.

I'm still a believer in China, partly because Mr. Hu and his aides have managed the economy so well. Mr. Hu has also done well in canceling the agriculture tax and taking other measures to try to address the destabilizing income gaps in China (there, 1 percent of the population now controls 60 percent of the wealth, whereas in the U.S., 5 percent controls 60 percent of the wealth).

Yet ultimately, Mr. Hu's efforts to create stability by clamping down just risk more instability. Most Chinese don't want upheavals, but they are fed up with corruption and lies, with being blocked from Google and Wikipedia, with having to waste time studying political drivel like Mr. Hu's "Eight Honorables and Eight Shames" campaign. Wags call it "Hu shuo ba dao," a clever pun that translates as "utter nonsense."

Indeed, Mr. Hu's crackdown has been singularly ineffective, annoying people more than scaring them. Many Communist Party officials worry that crackdowns just anger and alienate the public; that is why some have talked of allowing people to let off steam through greater freedom of the press and more elections. In one province, a poll found that 85 percent of officials themselves wanted to speed up political reform.

But Mr. Hu seems paralyzed, altogether the weakest Chinese leader since Hua Guofeng in the 1970's. The result? Brace yourself for turbulence ahead in China.