24 years after June 4, party must loosen grip on China's court system
Jerome A. Cohen says the Communist Party's sustained efforts since June 4 to influence China's courts for its own ends may be easing, but judicial independence is still a long way off
Twenty-four years after the June 4 massacre, China is finally releasing from prison the last of the Tiananmen protesters who were convicted of "counter-revolutionary" offences, but spared execution. They are a tragic lot - seriously ill, often mentally as well as physically. Yet their release hardly writes finis to one of the saddest chapters of modern Chinese history.
The influence of June 4 lives on in many ways, especially the muzzling of any discussion concerning it and the continuing persecution of democratic activists and civil rights advocates. One of the less obvious, but abiding consequences of what the Communist Party now euphemistically refers to as "the political turmoil" is the ongoing struggle among party leaders and law reformers to determine the extent of the party's control of the judiciary.
The late Zhao Ziyang would undoubtedly be pleased that his ill-fated attempt has finally succeeded
The 1980s witnessed a decade of post-Cultural Revolution legal development that survived both the party's 1983 "strike hard" campaign against common criminals and political enemies and its subsequent assault against "bourgeois liberalism".
Not long after assuming the mantle of party leadership in 1987, the progressive Zhao Ziyang boldly ordered an end to the practice whereby the party "political-legal committee" in every area used its power to "co-ordinate" activities of local police, prosecutors, justice officials, lawyers and judges to decide the outcome of any civil, administrative and criminal cases it deemed "sensitive", including those involving multiple government agencies. Zhao and other reformers within the party sought to bolster the autonomy and legitimacy of China's much-maligned courts by freeing them from the committee's interference in individual cases.
Zhao's ousting in the events leading up to June 4 and the party's all-out mobilisation of the courts to severely punish "counter-revolution" in the years that followed the massacre ended party reformers' efforts to begin to vindicate the promise of "judicial independence" enshrined in the constitution. Ren Jianxin, president of the Supreme People's Court at that time and concurrently head of the Central Party Political-Legal Committee, minced no words in commanding the courts to carry out the party's mission by serving as instruments of suppression.
Many months later, when a superficial calm had settled on Beijing, the capital's Foreign Correspondents' Club invited me to give a talk assessing prospects for renewing China's progress towards the rule of law. When the Voice of America broadcast excerpts of the talk, it reportedly infuriated Premier Li Peng who, with Deng Xiaoping's approval, had presided over the June 4 slaughter.
Although Li welcomed my support for China's pending World Trade Organisation candidacy and the anticipated stimulus that would provide further legal development, he was apparently outraged by my statement that the courts had been reduced to instruments for suppressing people.