Confucianism in Contemporary Chinese Politics by Zhang Shanruo Ning;

Author:Zhang, Shanruo Ning; [Zhang, Shanruo Ning]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Judicial Corruption: Predicament of Moralistic Rule

On June 17, 2009, Mr. Yang Jinzhu, a lawyer practicing in Hunan Province, published an open letter to Mr. Zhang Wenxian, Head of Jilin Province Supreme Court, in response to Mr. Zhang’s comments three months earlier regarding the newly enacted regulations from the Supreme Court which forbid “inappropriate social relations between judges and lawyers.” In his interpretation, Mr. Zhang noted “it is indeed the case that some lawyers take advantage of their relations with the judges as classmates, friends, and acquaintances to build guanxi with the judges . . . a small number of lawyers have ulterior motives for developing such relations and (help) their clients to bribe the judges through them.”41 In the open letter, Mr. Yang took offense that Mr. Zhang seemed to blame the lawyers for judicial corruption in China. In a media interview following this incident, Mr. Zhang explained his view and experiences with the issue of judge-lawyer relations. When he was a law professor at Jilin University in the early 1990s, Zhang also worked part-time as a lawyer. His experiences made him realize that “it was very hard to draw and keep a firm line between the judges and the lawyers because of their personal relations” and the moral obligations embedded in such relations. After the institutionalization of the legal qualifying exams, many lawyers and judges in the same town used to be classmates, a strong basis for guanxi networking. One incident was so alarming that Zhang decided to quit practicing law altogether. Zhang was representing a client in a civil lawsuit and the judge was a former student of his. After the court sessions, the judge, half-jokingly, yet out of his moral obligation to always show respect and deference to one’s teacher, said, “Teacher, you made such a terrific argument. Why don’t you write the court decisions as well?” “I have a lot of students in the legal field in Jilin,” Zhang reasoned, and the personal relationships would always be lurking in the background. He discussed the “good old days” in the early 1990s with a touch of nostalgia: “things were very different then. People didn’t go around looking for guanxi so desperately, asking everybody whether they know someone in the court.”42

The “collaborative” relationship between judges and lawyers has become so blatant and widespread that “judicial corruption” has become a heatedly debated topic in both media and academia in China. The public’s suspicion of illegitimate collaboration between judges and lawyers is so high that Mr. Xiao Yang, Head of China’s Supreme Court, surmised: “when people do not get automatically suspicious seeing a lawyer and a judge walking together, we would finally begin to have some confidence that the lawyer-judge relationship is indeed ‘normal’”(Xie 2005). In March 2004, the Supreme Court and the Ministry of Legal Affairs (司法部) jointly launched “The Stipulations on Regulating the Relationship between Lawyers and Judges in order to Protect Legal Justice.” The key strategy was to set up a “quarantine space” between lawyers and judges (Xie 2005).

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