Americans in China by Terry Lautz

Author:Terry Lautz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Art, Law, and Politics

Jerome Cohen retired from Paul, Weiss in 2000 and spent each fall in Beijing from 2002 to 2006 helping to train Chinese judges, lawyers, and police in a program jointly run by Temple University and Tsinghua University Law School. Joan Cohen met with artists, attended exhibitions, did interviews, and wrote articles for various publications. Their Chinese colleagues had far more personal liberty than in earlier decades, but constraints on free speech still existed. An exhibition Joan planned at Peking University in 2005 was cancelled, and when she was invited to give a talk at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, she found herself in an unmarked room with only a small audience. The school’s dean politely introduced her and quickly excused himself, presumably because her presentation included three images of the Tiananmen protest movement. A celebration in her honor in 2012 left her badly disillusioned. Some Chinese friends were not told about the event, and others were frightened away when they heard she had invited Ai Weiwei after being assured that she could ask anyone she wanted to attend.53

Jerry’s assessment of Chinese law is a mixed picture. “China has resurrected and strengthened its court system, restored the Procuracy and the Ministry of Justice, and has re-established the legal profession,” he wrote in 2012. “Legal education has flourished; there are now almost 700 law schools and law departments, and several hundred thousand people take the bar examination each year. Law journals and books have proliferated. China has also expanded its international legal cooperation. It participates in many of the global multilateral treaties and organizations that it once shunned.”

Nevertheless, he believes that China’s legal system, still based on a Soviet-type model, is fundamentally flawed. The PRC’s constitution guarantees freedom of speech, press, assembly, and association, but it is the Chinese Communist Party that dictates ideology, constitutional principles, legislation, and the design of legal education. The Party, writes Cohen, “has a stranglehold on the granular details: the selection, training, promotion, and removal of judges and other legal officials. There is also the licensing, restriction, disbarment, and prosecution of lawyers. And, of course, the Party can dictate outcomes in individual court cases . . . . Those who are perceived as a threat to the government are subject to arbitrary detention, house arrest and other forms of harassment, even when there is no legal justification.”54

He points out that a crackdown on Chinese lawyers in recent years highlights a dilemma. Should they struggle for their rights using existing rules and regulations or try to upend Communist control over the legal system altogether? “One of the best-known human rights lawyers is Gao Zhisheng, a man who has suffered terribly,” recalls Cohen. “In March 2006, I sat in a coffee shop in Beijing with him and nine or ten human rights lawyers discussing what is the proper posture for the future. Most of them agreed with me that if they want to go on fighting, the best strategy is to gradually opt for more reform within the existing parameters.

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