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Sapio, Flora --- "Legal erosion and the policing of petitions" [2013] ELECD 401; in McConville, Mike; Pils, Eva (eds), "Comparative Perspectives on Criminal Justice in China" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2013) 345

Book Title: Comparative Perspectives on Criminal Justice in China

Editor(s): McConville, Mike; Pils, Eva

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781781955857

Section: Chapter 15

Section Title: Legal erosion and the policing of petitions

Author(s): Sapio, Flora

Number of pages: 25

Abstract/Description:

In a Beijing courtroom, the judge brought down his gavel and declared the man who stood before him guilty of intentional wounding, sentencing him to ten years imprisonment. The defendant, Wang Yujun, the deputy director of Hongxing public security station had tortured Zhang Jianshe, a criminal suspect (Wang, 2007). Cases such as this demonstrate how the separation between law and power has increased, even though the law may still be used to legitimate state power. Wang Yujun was subsequently made unable to torture suspects, so the law was eventually able to restrain state coercion. A man in power, he was held responsible for his actions, signalling that not only citizens, but also officials are accountable to the law. Chinese law is becoming more and more autonomous (Nonet and Selznick, 1978). If this is the case, and we know that to a certain extent it is, why then do some citizens indeed disappear (Nonet and Selznick, 1978)? While unlawful detentions may involve a minority of Chinese citizens, any deliberate use of state power to crush rights – no matter on what grounds, scale or with what frequency – reveals that ‘something rotten’ (Benjamin, 1921) still exists in the law. In this chapter, I attempt to understand how this ‘something’ managed to sneak through legal reform.