Asia in the New Millennium. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2017. viii, 249 pp. US$80.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8131-7393-1.
The interplay between law and power has been an enduring topic in Chinese studies. Both Chinese and those abroad take it as a skeleton key to understanding and interpreting various aspects—political, legal, economic, cultural, diplomatic, etc.—of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) governance. Professors Qiang Fang and Xiaobing Li further contribute to the literature pertaining to this topic by discussing, in their book Power versus Law in Modern China: Cities, Courts, and the Communist Party, “how the Party restructured its relationship to a changing society and reacted to political, economic, legal, and social issues such as urban construction, housing policies, and the rights of private citizens” (13).
In this book, the authors label China in the era of Xi Jinping (who has assumed the presidency since 2013) “a state of legal asymmetry”—a term connoting the coexistence of “powerless law” and “lawless power” in the country (175–178). According to the authors, “[i]n a state of legal asymmetry, people with power…will be less likely to be afraid of violating the law no matter how egregious their activities, while people without power will be punished in accordance with the law no matter how minor their crimes” (177). Such conclusion is built mainly on the examination, in all chapters of the book, of four cases that the authors claim depict abuses of administrative power in China.
The three types of abuses of administrative power targeted by the book include: (1) the power of local governments to push the enforcement of urban land-use planning in the Waitan Garden case between 2001 and 2002 in the city of Wuhan (chapters 1 to 3); (2) the power of governmental departments confronted by individual citizens exercising their legal rights in administrative litigations in the Wang Peirong case between 2000 and 2012 in the city of Xuzhou (chapters 4 and 5); and (3) the exploitation of power by certain high-ranking Party officials in the cases of Chen Liangyu and Bo Xilai between 2008 and 2012 in two municipalities directly under the Central Government—Shanghai and Chongqing (chapter 6).
With a view to reavealing how administrative power has been exercised by the named local governments and high officials in a way that infringed upon the various rights of citizens, the authors present expatiatory materials in the form of complainant interviews, petition documents, media reports, and even anecdotes about power struggles within the CCP, which are missioned to “[voice] the complaints and resentments in the cities and [interpret] government policies and legal practices” (13). Based directly on these materials, the authors challenge the legitimacy of the enumerated administrative power. The effectiveness of such a challenge, nevertheless, can be fortified if those primary materials are scrutinized further through the lens of law.
The authors’ efforts to crystallize the Xi Administration’s basic tone towards power and law concentrate on Xi’s parlance of “knife-hilt”—a metaphor for the political-judicial departments in China. Having resorted to the theory of legal instrumentalism (4), the authors interpret such parlance to the effect that CCP is determined to retain power above the law by avowing to act as the “holder” of that “knife-hilt” (3–5, 177–178). From the reader’s perspective, before jumping to the concluding observation that the CCP’s motive for holding such a “knife-hilt” is to suppress the law (179–180), rather than protect the law from abuses of power, the authors are expected to provide a holistic review of the genuine objectives and legal implications of “holding” such a “knife-hilt” by embedding it in the latest legal and political senarios in China.
Some further inquiries from this reviewer pertain to a few aspects of the overall organization and presentation of the book. For example, one would expect the authors to equip the reader with more explanation as to the significance of the four cases—all of which commenced and closed before Xi’s assumption of the presidency—in weighing power and law in Xi’s era. In addition, though the authors, by invoking the dictum “[j]ustice without force is impotent [and] force without justice is tyrannical” (5), acknowledge in the book that the interplay between law and power is more than just suppression, they do not extend their discussions to the collaborative aspect of such interplay. Accordingly, in this reader’s view, to be a more comprehensive and objective envisioning of the interplay between law and power in contemporary China, this study should have incorporated into its analysis the discernible legislative and judicial reforms pushed by the CCP leadership over the past few years.
Xing Lijuan
City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China