Samuel A. Bleicher adjunct Professor at Georgetown University Law School recently returned from two months of teaching Chinese Judges at the National Judges College in Beijing.
Also in 2007, he taught for four months in the Temple U. Law School/Tsinghua U. Law School Joint LLM Program for Chinese judges, prosecutors, and government lawyers.
He recently wrote? an article? entitled……Hu Jintao Wants Deeper Legal Reform; American Lawyers Point to the Wrong Model
Here’s his introduction
Hu Jintao and American legal scholars do agree on one thing: China?s legal system needs reform. It needs strengthening to perform its essential functions: enforcing the laws protecting citizens from corrupt local officials and rapacious private enterprises, and providing them with honest and efficient dispute resolution.
President Hu, in his role as Secretary-General of the Chinese Communist Party, raised the need for ?deeper judicial reform? to a new level by addressing the subject in a report on to the 17th National Congress in October 2007. His concern is well justified. As the Washington Post noted, President Hu and his colleagues are concerned that rampant corruption and ?local protectionism? are a serious threat to the legitimacy and authority of the current Chinese leadership ? far more than the noisy opposition of advocates of political and religious freedom. James Fallows pointed out in his April 2009 article about China in The Atlantic,
?[W]hen people complain, it is usually about crooked bosses, reporters, mayors, or bureaucrats ? not about the system or its rulers. Principled protests against the system and its repression certainly do exist . . . But that is not the norm. ? Perhaps [most Chinese] are missing the big picture, but for now they generally act as if they expect the national system to protect them against lapses at the local level.?
The Government recognizes the inability of the current legal system to deal effectively with these problems. But despite repeated reform efforts, it has not created effective national legal structures that can induce powerful local and provincial leaders to comply with national laws.
Full article at? http://www.usasialaw.org/?cat=8
