When a recent forum in Beijing brought together deans from law schools around the world, the most stirring moment came as Zhou Yongkang (周永康), the most senior Communist Party leader in charge of legal affairs in China, delivered an address stressing his support for a strong legal system. Zhou said China must “comply with the universal principles of law” and “adopt and learn from all great human precedents in the area of rule of law.”
The idea of building a “rule of law culture” is now all the rage in China’s media, and a look at recent major news stories tells us exactly why. Rule of law is no longer just about protecting the rights of the weak in China, but concerns the safety and security of government elites as well.
The first news story to make ripples lately is the bribery case against Long Xiaole (龙小乐), a senior Party official at Wuhan University in China’s inland Hubei province. Not long after the trial began, Long Xiaole told the court his confession had been extracted through torture, involving three consecutive days and nights of interrogation during which he was subjected to beatings and extreme cold. Long’s prosecutors acknowledged dismissively that “the interrogation had been rather long.” But they countered that “there are no laws or regulations [in China] about the length of interrogations, and so there no illegalities were involved.”
Legal scholars, including Ding Dafan (丁大帆), quickly pointed out that China signed and ratified the United Nations Convention Against Torture more than twenty years ago. Article I of the convention states that “torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession . . . ” Insofar as the convention applies to criminal law in China, any infliction of physical or mental suffering by public officers is illegal and constitutes torture.
The second major news story was the trial of Yang Jiannong (杨建农), a top police official in Hunan province. Shortly before Yang’s arrest, his wife, Chen Ling (陈玲), had made an internet post exposing a hornet’s nest of “dark plots” within the Hunan Public Security Department. Right on the heels of these online revelations, the department announced on its official website that Yang Jiannong was under investigation by provincial discipline inspectors for alleged acts of bribery reaching into the millions.
Both husband and wife are now prisoners. We can only speculate as to what connection this has to Chen Ling’s online muckraking.
Lawyers on the Hunan case have pointed to all sorts of problems in how the cases against Yang Jiannong and his wife have been handled. To begin with, Yang’s telephone line was reportedly monitored secretly while he was serving in his post. According to China’s Criminal Procedural Law, the family of Yang Jiannong’s wife, who was subsequently arrested for “fraudulent registration of assets”, should have been notified within twenty-four hours — they were not. Nor was the paperwork for her arrest handled properly.
Chen Ling has still been unable to meet with her lawyers, Hunan authorities claiming the case deals with “national secrets.” This explanation is ludicrous considering that “fraudulent registration of assets” is a common criminal offense, having nothing at all to do with matters of national secrecy. Everything gives the appearance local authorities are acting as they please, in utter contempt for the law and procedure.
Long Xiaole and Yang Jiannong are elites within China’s political system. They are, to use a popular phrase, “men of men.” But regardless of their privilege and status, their fates are fragile and every step is fraught with danger. Knocked down a notch, they find no more protection for their most basic rights than the most ordinary of Chinese. The system deals with them as it deals with all those who fall through the cracks and find themselves in positions of weakness.
In China, where modern rule of law effectively does not exist, and where experts say more than 70 percent of total social wealth is now concentrated in state hands, the national grab for wealth by those within the system operates by the law of the jungle. There are no rules or boundaries. This means the prospects for those inside the system, like Long Xiaole and Yang Jiannong, are as unpredictable as for anyone else. No one enjoys security, and the nightmare facing Long and Yang is shared by all those in positions of power and privilege. The system offers no guarantees, and might at any moment pull them down into the maelstrom.
We often assume the purpose of rule of law is to protect the weak. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. Rule of law is about protecting the rights of everyone, regardless of how much wealth or power they have, and it should mean anyone can plan for the future with a sense of security.
If China’s ruling elite want this kind of security, the only way forward is developing a culture of rule of law in China. This is why Zhou Yongkang’s words were so timely and understandable. It is not enough for the weak to clamor for rule of law. The resources of our society are not in their hands, after all.
Only when both weak and strong reach a broad consensus on the urgency of this issue can we turn the resources of our country toward the development of rule of law. And only then will change truly come. Clearly, the time is already here.
A version of this article originally appeared in Chinese at Time Weekly. [View Time Weekly on the China Media Map].

I was beside myself with excitement, and my face was washed with tears.

Earlier this month Beijing’s Sanwei Shuwu bookstore [blog here] organized a lecture by Xin Ziling (辛子陵) called “The Political Reform Question.” The lecture, scheduled for 3 p.m. on Saturday, October 16, was suddenly cancelled and replaced with another lecture on rule of law by Xiao Han (萧瀚), a professor at China University of Political Science and Law.
Sanwei did not specify the reason for the cancellation, but it should be noted that Xin Ziling was one of the 23 Party elders who penned an open letter on October 11 calling for freedom of speech in China.
Xin, a former official at the China National Defence University, is also the author of The Accomplishments and Sins of Mao Zedong (千秋功罪毛澤東), a book assessing the legacy of Mao.
Xin Jiling’s original lecture for Sanwei Shuwu has now been posted online, and the piece has drawn a flurry of interest today.
A portion of the lecture follows. In it, Xin attacks those who seek, as he sees it, to hijack the political reform debate with the outdated “theory of delimitation” — distinguishing between “proletarian” democracy and “bourgeois” democracy — which he calls a “protective amulet . . . for single-party dictatorship” handed down by Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin.
We recommend that readers of Chinese review the comments beneath Xin’s essay at Chinavalue.net, including Xin’s own remarks. There is plenty of discussion there of yesterday’s People’s Daily piece as well, which is a good counterpoint to Xin’s arguments.

The Political Reform Question
October 16, 2010
By Xin Ziling (辛子陵)
Political reforms in China have dragged behind and scarcely budged, retarded by instinctual resistance from networks of influence and power. The protective amulet of their Leninism is the “theory of delimitation” (划界论). I’ve written an essay called, “Challenging One Paper and Two Magazines, Overturning the Theory of Delimitation,” which I posted online. It sets out to thoroughly overturn and shatter this “theory of delimitation.” [NOTE: “One paper and two magazines” (两报一刊) refers to the complete monopolization of the press by political power, particularly under Mao Zedong, but refers more directly in this case to recent pieces of conservatism on political reform appearing in prominent Communist Party newspapers.]
As soon as the winds of political reform start to blow, the writing hands of the mainstream media [NOTE: this means “Party media”] turn out to clearly delimit the issue. They ask whether we are surnamed Proletariat or surnamed Capitalist (姓无姓资), and they draw a clear line between bourgeois democracy and proletarian democracy. On September 4, the Guangming Daily came out with this piece called, “Two Democracies of Different Natures Must Not Be Confused,” [https://chinamediaproject.org/2010/09/06/7345/]. The same day, the Liberation Army Daily issued a piece written by Jiang Ganlin (蒋干麟), the head of the People’s Liberation Army’s Nanjing Political Studies Academy, which spoke of the need to delimit “four crucial boundaries.” Issue 18 of the journal Seeking Truth ran a piece under the headline, “The Institutional Superiority and Basic Characteristics of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” which also urged the need to “clearly delimit the differences between the democracy of socialism with Chinese characteristics and Western capitalist democracy.” The Party media [NOTE: The term used here is “one newspaper and two magazines.”] are lining up for battle, puffing up for opposition to political reform.
This theory of “delimitation” is a legacy passed down from Lenin, our patriarch, and the representative work in question is, “The Proletarian Revolution and the Traitor [Karl] Kautsky.” Lenin said at the time that “proletarian democracy is more democratic by a factor of 100 than any other form of democracy; Soviet political power is more democratic by a factor of 100 than even the most democratic bourgeois republic.”
[1]. There are two key positions behind this thinking. The first is class theory, that in the democratic system of the proletariat, the worker’s classes, the peasants the masses of ordinary people rule the country, and this has class superiority. Then there is [the superiority arising] from numbers theory, in that the worker’s classes, peasants and the ordinary masses account for more than 90 percent of the national population, and this means superiority of numbers. Lenin said: “The proletarian democratic system (of which Soviet political power is one form) exists for the vast majority of people, and for the expansion of democracy across the world to a level never before seen for the sake of exploited labor.”
[2]. Once these two positions were admitted, the opposition withered. For decades ever after, the Communist Parties of the various socialist nations of the world took this up as their protective amulet, confidently going ahead with their single-party dictatorships.
The people still subscribed to this idea was during the first generation in these socialist nations. Once political power had been violently seized, who would rule if the chiefs did not? With the second generation, a crisis of legitimacy emerged, and by the third generation we had the disintegration of the Soviet Union, dramatic change in Eastern Europe, and new paths of reform and opening in China and Vietnam.
This protective amulet that Lenin created for single-party dictatorship was issued in 1918, more than 90 years ago. There have been fundamental changes since to the proletarian democratic system and the bourgeois democratic system. These fundamental changes can be seen in the transposition of these two. The so-called “proletarian democratic system” has gradually transformed into a system representing a small capitalist elite holding political power (in China and North Korea, for example), and the “bourgeois democratic system” has grown beyond the scope of the wealthy to become a democratic system of the whole people (as in the United States and the nations of the European Union) in which the vote has become a powerful weapon by which ordinary people protect their rights and interests.