Here’s the piece and link
http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/10/13/china-legal-reform-push-could-be-setback-for-xi/
Many analysts see President Xi Jinping‘s announcement last week that one of the major planks in his political platform—the “mass line” campaign which was designed to clean up the Communist Party by fighting against “formalism, bureaucratism, hedonism and extravagance”—was “basically completed” as unsurprising.
After all, political campaigns in China have to stop at some point, and later this month there’s the upcoming party plenum, which is slated to center on the role of law in Chinese governance and society. Xi’s declaration of the campaign’s end could be part of a larger plan to secure the progress Beijing has already made in cleaning up the party and making officials more attentive to their work by institutionalizing those reforms through law.
But what if this decision to drop the mass-line campaign isn’t what Xi wanted to do?
There’s some evidence for that interpretation.
Chinese political campaigns have been a core component of Xi’s political strategy to remake the party and the nation; no matter how long they last, they’re apt to conclude with greater fanfare. State-controlled media did note the various achievements of the campaign. But Xi’s own take was less than laudatory, noting that “the party made a good start to improve the style, but the results are still preliminary, and the foundation is not solid.”
That hardly sounds like Xi’s declaring victory.
It’s also not clear if the party plenum will actually work in Xi’s favor, if only because it’s not yet clear what legal reforms are in the offing at the plenum.
Reports of experiments in Shanghai hint that some officials and advisors are urging a major restructuring of China’s judiciary by making personnel more professional and far better trained than they are presently.
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There are other commentaries in the party media signaling that the emphasis during the plenum may simply be giving legal authorization to government decisions on administrative efficiency and reorganization that have been already been announced. Attention to that end of China’s legal environment might help to accelerate some of Beijing’s efforts to decentralize authority if only to clarify what Chinese officials are permitted to do locally, rather than what they’ve been able to get away with because the laws were not clear or consistent.
Neither of those approaches helps Xi with his goal of making the party a more talented organization that’s more relevant to a modernizing Chinese society. It’s been Xi’s program to compel cadres to engage in “self-purification, self-improvement, and self-innovation.”
Xi has very rarely mentioned legal reform as a goal for his leadership, and when he has it’s usually only to reiterate the importance of using law as a means to govern more effectively and efficiently.
If reforming China’s current legal climate is what the plenum will focus on—to make it what one party commentator called “the yardstick of Chinese political life”—then Xi may have something to worry about.
For example, Xi has made it clear that he wants to energize the masses to become more involved in supervising cadres. But that goal would presumably include enabling citizens to monitor officials who behave badly by publicizing their misdeeds. Clearly, Xi and like-minded comrades are less than keen about that option. In their view, it’s better that such malfeasance is reported first to party organizations, not through social media. The plenum might move in a different direction, and seek to begin to secure that right, in the name of fighting corruption.
Then there’s also what role law is to play in “putting power in a cage”, as many Chinese commentaries put it: That is, making government decisions transparent and the officials who make them accountable for those decisions.
Here again, while there’s clearly support for such a system among legal reformers, many party conservatives would clearly prefer that error and malfeasance are handled within the Communist party, where there’s political protection for those in good favor, and where legal sanctions and judges take second place to party doctrine and cadres.
Either Xi and his like-minded comrades didn’t want to dominate the plenum—very unlikely for a leader who’s keen on charting his own course —or they got outflanked by those reformers who think that the law deserves a chance to solve problems that the party may simply not be equipped to address just by being draconian towards its own membership.
Of course, this could be Xi the master tactician; he could be lobbying other delegates who write the documents and help make the decisions at such gatherings to forego any changes that would diminish party power. Or Xi could be waiting to see what the plenum emerges with and work with other leaders who think as he does to water down any major legal reform.
Either way, the plenum provides a time to take stock of Xi’s further prospects for changing how the Communist party operates. The more any announced legal reforms limit party power the more the meeting is likely to look like a setback for Xi – perhaps his first since taking command two years ago.
Russell Leigh Moses is the Dean of Academics and Faculty at The Beijing Center for Chinese Studies. He is writing a book on the changing role of power in the Chinese political system.
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