Chinese Law Prof Blog

Collected works of Stanley Lubman now online

Just about everyone in the PRC law field knows about the contributions of Stanley Lubman (and if you don't, you should). Columbia Law School's Center for Chinese Legal Studies has now posted his entire oeuvre on its website. The collection includes articles, book chapter, op-eds, blog posts, and selected talks. Here's the link:

http://web.law.columbia.edu/chinese-legal-studies/collected-works-stanley-b-lubman

GWU Law School panel discussion on South China Sea arbitration

Wednesday, Sept. 21, at 12:15 pm, in Lerner 402 at George Washington University Law School, 2000 H St. NW, Washington, DC.

Here are the details:

 

Should the United States send Ling Wancheng back to China? Could it?

The New York Times recently carried a story confirming a long-standing rumor that Ling Wancheng, brother of the toppled top aide to China’s former top leader, Hu Jintao, was living in the United States. Apparently China wants him back in China—not surprisingly, given his intelligence value. Presumably—apparently it’s all unofficial so far—China is telling the US that he’s wanted on corruption or other criminal charges. This has led to quite a bit of discussion on the question of whether the US could or should send Ling back. (This blog post is a slightly expanded and more legally technical version of my contribution to a discussion at the Asia Society’s ChinaFile site.)

I think it might be useful to lay out some of the legal issues involved here. First of all, let’s distinguish between extradition and deportation. Extradition would take place pursuant to a treaty between China and the US, and critically would not require a finding by US authorities that Ling had violated any US law (or even Chinese law). Nor would any other legal basis for sending Ling back (aside from the treaty) be required. All that is necessary would be for China to make a case—presumably meeting some standard of plausibility—that Ling had violated Chinese law and should be returned to face trial. But for the very cogent reasons discussed by Jerome Cohen in his contribution, there is no extradition treaty between China and the US.

Thus, if the US government wants to keep Ling, it has no obligation to send him back. This raises two issues: (1) Should it want to send Ling back? (2) Assuming it wants to send him back, can it?

On the first issue, one of the points raised in this discussion has been the idea that sending Ling back will promote cooperation by China in US law enforcement. I’m dubious about this. In a wide range of fields, China has over the years been consistently and highly uncooperative with both the US and other countries in their efforts to investigate unlawful activities in China. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board have experienced years of frustration in seeking Chinese cooperation in their efforts to investigate securities fraud and accounting malpractices involving Chinese firms and citizens. Just two months ago, an Associated Press report described the “legal firewall” shielding Chinese parties from foreign investigations, in this case Italian attempts—utterly stonewalled by China—to investigate the flow of $4.9 billion in laundered money to China. And despite its denunciations of hacking and denials of government involvement, the Chinese government has refused to help foreign authorities bring Chinese hackers to book. China doesn’t need to do more than anyone else, but it does need to offer the degree of cooperation that’s normal in the international community before it can reasonably ask others to cooperate with it. If the US government has good policy reasons for wanting to send Ling back, so be it, but a vain hope that it will induce greater cooperation by China in a range of law enforcement activities should not be among them.

The second issue is whether the US government can send Ling back, assuming it wants to.

The short answer is maybe. There are three general types of legal basis. (There may be others.) The first is contained in 8 USC § 1227(a)(4)(C)(i), which states that “[a]n alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.” There are some exceptions to this deportation power but they don’t seem applicable to Ling’s case.

The second legal basis would be in a violation by Ling of immigration law in connection with his entry into the United States. This is not of course to say that Ling did violate immigration law when he entered the United States—I have no knowledge of the circumstances under which he came here—but if, for example, he entered on a non-immigrant visa without the intention, at the time of entry, to depart when the time came, that would be a violation of immigration law and likely grounds for deportation, as would any other kind of false statements (at least if they were material) in the visa application process.

The third legal basis—which I use as a catch-all category—would be the commission of various acts (for example, terrorism and other crimes) that Congress has deemed grounds for deportation. Again, I have no reason to believe that Ling has committed any such acts.

The point, then, is that the US government operates under some constraints where deportation is involved. It cannot just decide to deport and then deport. There must be a statutory basis.

Let us suppose, then, that the US government relies on deportability on foreign policy grounds—the first basis above, which does not depend on any violation of US law by Ling. That is still not the end of the story. There is a further complication posed by the fact that Ling could raise various bars against deportation. He could, for example, claim that he is the subject of political persecution and seek asylum on those grounds. Such a claim would not, of course, necessarily succeed.

A second and more plausible claim—since it relies importantly on conditions in China and not much on Ling’s personal characteristics—would be that he was in danger of being tortured if returned to China. The United States is a party to the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT). The CAT is one of the reasons that the Canadian courts made it so difficult for Canada to send Lai Changxing back to China. Art. 3 says, "No State Party shall expel, return ("refouler") or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.” The US has declared that it interprets this to mean "more likely than not."

The status of the CAT under US law is complicated, but the long and the short of it is that Ling can raise a claim of possible torture to try to avoid getting sent back to China. (As with all claims, to say he can raise it is not to say he can raise it successfully.) In 1998, Congress passed legislation intended to incorporate the rules of the CAT, which the US had ratified, into US law, precisely because the US had specifically declared upon ratification that the CAT would not automatically become part of US law. Congress specifically directed the executive to enact regulations implementing the US’s obligations under the CAT, and to use as definitions of various terms the definitions of those terms in the CAT. But Congress also added that any regulations so enacted would not be reviewable by courts. In other words, the executive branch would have the last word on what compliance with CAT meant. Other countries might disagree, but that wouldn’t affect anyone’s rights under US law. Thus, Ling could attempt to resist deportation by asserting whatever rights he has under the relevant Department of Homeland Security (DHS) regulations designed to implement the CAT.

Even assuming he can successfully make a case under those regulations, however, there is still a final question: does the Secretary of State’s power to deport under 8 USC § 1227 trump an alien’s right not to be deported under the relevant DHS regulations implementing the CAT? Who wins in case of a conflict? The same conflict could crop up if Ling seeks asylum on the grounds of political persecution. I do not know the answer under US law, but it might well be different from the answer under international law.

Finally, let me caution readers that I am not an expert in this area of law, and would welcome correction where I have got it wrong.

The Ai Weiwei visa mess - how it might have happened, from a Foreign Office insider

With the kind permission of the author, I'd like to share Kerry Brown's take on how this whole mess might have happened:

I worked as the Head of Policy at UK Visas for six months in 2005. It was my last Foreign Office job, though the department was one shared between the Foreign Office and the UK Home Office. Since then I have been fully rehabilitated back into society! I have to say though, from knowledge from that period, that the Ai Weiwei visa case has all the hallmarks of a cock up. In some ways, it would be preferable had there been high level fiat about this, because at least it would have shown that someone, somewhere was making decisions.

The truth is that Entry Clearance Offices, at least in the British system have God like powers, and the only person who can overturn their decisions, in the end (as this case proves) is the Home Secretary. That means that often very junior and inexperienced visa staff, who are more often than not utterly clueless to the changing rules and regulations governing visa issuance, can make the most extraordinarily perverse judgments. The case I remember best from my brief, inglorious stint in this position (it was hard to do a job where the words in the job title were so completely at odds with the reality of what I was doing - there was, and I suspect still isn't, a visa `policy' - just mildly contained bedlam, so I spent my days reading Guy Debord and the situationists and gazing at the MI6 building gardens next door) was that of issuing work visas to people needed to come and be employed in UK abattoirs. Unsurprisingly, these positions were hard to fill with local staff, so at that time, for some reason, they were recruited from (I think) Ukraine. Staff before going out to post to be visa offices were told that unmarried, largely uneducated, young men from underdeveloped countries were the highest risk and the ones they needed to be most careful about issuing work visas too! (Needless to say, UK Visas resisted all attempts to include its work in relevant racial and gender equality legislation). However, it was precisely this demographic that tended to apply to come to the UK for six months to work in abattoirs.

All worked well, and the annual quota of abattoir workers were happily delivered, until a more pure minded, zealous visa official was sent to work in Kiev, and promptly turned down the whole batch of new applicants, causing chaos in the farming community in the UK reliant on this source of labour, who of course used their considerable clout to protest. It was to no avail though, The person who did the refusing was acting within the law, and there was no way that year any were let through. I think it was only resolved with them being offered some other tasty post to exercise their budding bureaucratic skills, and a more compliant official sent to replace them. .

So I can well imagine the scenario with Ai Weiwei. A visa officer with a sheen of knowledge of his case, mostly culled from the Daily Mail (still no doubt shipped by air freight to the post in Beijing), who sees this Chinese avante garde artist attempting to sully the pure morals of the Great British public, and deciding to make a silent majority stand by turning him down. His or her Entry Clearance Manager, probably a Foreign Office appointee with a bit more political sense, would no doubt have had the `discussion' when reviewing the refusal, and suggesting a compromise (the 20 days). We have, ladies and gentlemen, the final result - a classic, great British cock up. I can well imagine the weary sighs in the Chancery the morning this story broke, because as ever they would be left to clear up a mess which, in this case, I truly believe, was not of their making.

Oh that there had been sinister calculations about how to avoid Ai bashing into Xi Jinping during his September visit. Or at least some artfulness and signs of intelligent (albeit perverse) life. But no, I really don't think there was.

But I would be happy (and relieved) to be proved wrong.

The Peter Humphrey/Yu Yingzeng case (again)

I last blogged about this case in August 2014, when Peter Humphrey and Yu Yingzeng were convicted and sentenced in Shanghai on charges of unlawful acquisition of personal information of citizens. I had some preliminary comments on the case based on the trial transcript and some quick-and-dirty research. I've now had the chance to do much more extensive research and to look at the text of the judgment as well, and have written up the results. They pretty much confirm my initial take: that this was a case of selective prosecution, and the sentences were out of line with cases with comparable facts. Humphrey was sentenced to 30 months' imprisonment; no previous defendant in any of Shanghai's 92 cases had ever gotten more than 24 months. (For those not following this story, Humphrey and Yu were recently released and have gone to the UK.)

The abstract is below; the full paper can be found here at the Social Science Research Network site.

The case of Peter Humphrey and Yu Yingzeng, convicted in China on August 2014 on charges of unlawful acquisition of citizens’ personal information, raises important issues about Chinese law. A narrow but important issue is how Chinese law draws the line between lawful and unlawful acquisition of information, a practice routinely carried out by businesses and individuals. This article examines the trial transcript and judgment in the Humphrey/Yu case and finds that it sheds regrettably little light on what remains a murky question. A broader issue is whether the Chinese legal system can be counted on to operate in a fair and impartial manner. This article presents the results of a study of all reported cases in Shanghai (ninety-two cases) involving the same provision of the Criminal Law that was the basis of the Humphrey/Yu conviction. It finds that the Humphrey/Yu sentences are outliers relative to other cases with comparable facts. In particular, Humphrey’s sentence of 30 months’ imprisonment was by far the heaviest sentence ever meted out by Shanghai courts, even though the circumstances seem conspicuously less serious than those of many other cases where lesser sentences were imposed.

Jerome Cohen on Lee Kuan Yew, the rule of law, and China

Here's a thoughtful piece worth reading: http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2015/05/25/glimpses-of-lee-kuan-yew/

Wang Xixin named vice president of Administrative Law Chamber of Supreme People's Court

I'm happy to announce that my friend and colleague Prof. Wang Xixin (王锡锌) of the Peking University Faculty of Law has just been named vice president of the Administrative Law Chamber of the Supreme People's Court. Congratulations!

Shen Kui and his Three Questions

Just when you start getting depressed about the way things are going in China, along comes Shen Kui (沈岿), a professor and former vice dean at Peking University Law School, to show that at least some of China's thinking people are not going to take the government's policy of intellectual anesthesia in higher education lying down. [Feb. 1 update: A previous version of this post had out-of-date information about Prof. Shen, identifying him as an associate professor and current vice dean.]

On Jan. 30, Minister of Education Yuan Guiren (袁贵仁) spoke at a conference on ideological and propaganda work in higher education, declaring that it was necessary "to strengthen control over the use of original-edition [i.e., not processed through some Party-controlled mechanism] Western materials. We must by no means allow materials that propagate Western values into our classrooms; it is absolutely forbidden for all kinds of speech that attacks and slanders the Party's leadership and blackens socialism to appear in university classrooms; it is absolutely forbidden to have all kinds of speech that violates the Constitution and the law spread in university classrooms; it is absolutely forbidden for teachers to complain and vent in the classroom and to transmit all kinds of harmful moods to students." (加强对西方原版教材的使用管理，绝不能让传播西方价值观念的教材进入我们的课堂;决不允许各种攻击诽谤党的领导、抹黑社会主义的言论在大学课堂出现;决不允许各种违反宪法和法律的言论在大学课堂蔓延;决不允许教师在课堂上发牢骚、泄怨气，把各种不良情绪传导给学生。)

In response, Prof. Shen posed three questions. The first is especially subversive, since it reminds us of the obvious and exposes the whole anti-Western-values campaign for the ridiculous charade that it is:

How do we distinguish "Western values" from "Chinese values"? As everyone knows, the specter of Communism that hovered over haunted Europe almost two centuries ago, after crossing mountains and seas to get to China, helped bring about the birth of the Chinese Communist Party; the Marxism that our current Constitution stipulates we must uphold, and the education in internationalism, communism, dialectical materialism, and historical materialism that the current Constitution stipulates we must undertake, are all from the West and have influenced China. There are countless examples of Western learning traveling east. Let me ask Minister Yuan, would it be possible for you to clearly delineate the line between "Western values" from "Chinese values"? (如何区分“西方价值”和“中国价值”？众所周知，近两个世纪前游荡在欧洲的共产主义幽灵“跨洋过海”来到中国后，才促成中国共产党的诞生；我国现行宪法规定必须坚持的马克思主义，必须进行的国际主义、共产主义、辩证唯物主义和历史唯物主义等的教育，也是源于西方，影响中国的。西学东渐的例子数不胜数，请教袁部长，是否可以请您清晰划出“西方价值”和“中国价值”的分界线?)

Here's his second question:

How do we distinguish "attacking and slandering the Party's leadership and blackening socialism" from "reflecting on the bends in the road in the Party's past and exposing dark facts"? No political party would dare to declare that it never did and never would make errors, and no society, whether socialist or capitalist, would dare to declare that it has no dark side. Let me ask Minister Yuan, would it be possible for you to clearly give us the standard for distinguishing between "attack" and "reflect", and between "blacken" and "expose darkness"? (如何区分“攻击诽谤党的领导、抹黑社会主义”和“反思党曾经走过的弯路、揭露黑暗现实”？没有任何政党，敢于宣布自己是从不会也永远不会犯错，也没有任何社会，无论是姓“社”还是姓“资”，敢于宣称自己是没有任何黑暗面的社会。请教袁部长，是否可以请您清晰给出“攻击”与“反思”、“抹黑”与“揭露黑暗”的区别标准？)

And finally, the third question:

How should the Education Ministry that you lead implement the policy of governing the country according to the Constitution and the law? If you have a clear and understandable answer to the above two questions, please publish another speech in good time; if you still don't have a clear answer, then please henceforth be cautious in your words and actions, because the Education Ministry that you lead relates to "the scientific and cultural level of the people of the whole nation" (Constitution, Art. 19), "the development of the natural and social sciences" (Constitution, Art. 20), and the citizens' "freedom to engage in scientific research, literary and artistic creation, and other cultural pursuits" (Constitution, Art. 47); in short, it relates to the renaissance of the Chinese people. If you casually talk about what can be done and what can't be done, then the least bit of incaution could mean a violation of the Constitution or the law. (如何让您领导的教育部贯彻执行依宪治国、依法治国的方针？如果您本人对以上两个问题已有明显易懂的答案，还请您适时发表另外一次讲话；如果您本人尚无明确答案，还请您以后谨言慎行，因为您所领导的教育部，关系到“全国人民的科学文化水平”（宪法第19条），关系到“自然科学和社会科学事业”（宪法第20条），关系到公民进行“科学研究、文学艺术创作和其他文化活动的自由”（宪法第47条），归根结底，关系到中华民族的复兴。您如果轻言什么可为、什么不可为，稍有不慎，就会存在触犯宪法、法律的可能性。)

Good stuff.

 

 

Jonathan Ocko

I am deeply saddened to announce that Jonathan Ocko, a good friend and a leader in the Chinese law community, passed away suddenly yesterday, apparently of a heart attack. Jonathan was a good friend and mentor not only to me, but to many others in the Chinese law community, and I'm sure outside of it as well. Jonathan was a professor of history at North Carolina State University, specializing in Chinese legal history. He also taught Chinese law courses regularly at Duke Law School. In addition to being a top-notch scholar, Jonathan was a very warm and friendly person. He will be greatly missed.

I hope to compile and post on this blog a collection of remembrances of Jonathan by those who knew him. If you'd like to contribute, please email me (dclarke at law.gwu.edu) your contribution along with a picture (if you can) and your preferred attribution (e.g., job title and institution).

 

 

The Chinese Legal Documents Series

The International Society for Chinese Law & History has a feature on its (terrific) website called the Chinese Legal Documents Series. Here's what it's all about:

This special series invites researchers to introduce a document from their own collections, provide a translation, and discuss what these texts might be used to study.  Our goal is to showcase the research of members, offer a small corpus of legal texts for the training of students, and give readers a wide view of what the study of Chinese legal history looks like.

An introduction to the series, as well as the first post in it, are here.

Ilham Tohti sentenced to life imprisonment

I suppose I shouldn't be shocked any more by this kind of thing, but I think I was not alone even among cynics in being taken aback by the harshness of the life sentence imposed on Ilham Tohti, a professor in Beijing of Uighur ethnicity, on charges of separatism. In an orgy of vindictiveness, the authorities, in addition to the gross mistreatment in detention and the sentence itself, extended punishment to his family by confiscating all his (and his wife's, under China's laws of marital property) assets, thus reducing them to penury.

Even if you think separatism is a heinous crime, the charges in this case were utterly bogus: Ilham ("Tohti" is his father's name, not a surname) is well known as someone who does not support independence for Xinjiang. I have met him and talked about these very issues. He does support more genuine autonomy for Xinjiang and for less repressive policies toward Uighurs. He has criticized the government. (These points are all true of a number of Han Chinese, too, but they have not been thrown into jail.) Apparently that was enough.

As many people have pointed out, jailing and intimidating Ilham and moderates like him is just about exactly the most counter-productive path on could imagine for the Chinese government to follow. They don't want moderate Uighurs; do they prefer radicals?

Murong Xuecun returns to China, asks to be arrested

Last May, the writer Murong Xuecun (慕容雪村, real name Hao Qun 郝群) published an op-ed in the New York Times protesting the arrest of Pu Zhiqiang and others for "stirring up trouble and provoking disturbances" and announcing his intention to turn himself in upon his return from Australia. Today (or perhaps yesterday - the statement is undated) he made good on his word, issuing a Statement of Surrender. Here's the Chinese text, followed by my translation.

Translation:

Statement of Surrender

Two months ago, Pu Zhiqiang, Xu Youyu, Hao Jian, Hu Shigen, and Liu Di were arrested on suspicion of “stirring up trouble and provoking disturbances.” This so-called “stirring up trouble and provoking disturbances” was in fact nothing more than people getting together at home: some ten-odd people met at Hao Jian’s home and discussed the Tiananmen Incident of 25 years earlier, and this became a crime. I was supposed to have been there, but on the day of the meeting I was to go to the University of Sydney to be a visiting scholar, so I made only a written declaration stating my own views of the Tiananmen Incident. I never imagined that in this so-called People’s Republic even this kind of trivial incident could become a crime. I made a declaration on the internet stating that I also participated in their stirring up trouble and provoking disturbances but was currently abroad, and asked the authorities to please wait for two months until I had finished by trip to the University of Sydney, when I would return to China and surrender.

I in no way accept the arrest of these people, but also don’t feel that I should get some special treatment. I did the same thing that they did and cannot stay outside of the matter. I have already returned to Beijing and await arrest at any moment. For the next 24 hours after issuing this statement of surrender, I will be waiting in my home in Haidian District, and request that those who come bring the appropriate documents. After 24 hours, please telephone in advance to arrange a time.

Hao Qun (Murong Xuecun)

 

Mike Dowdle on Cai Dingjian

Here's a very nice tribute to the late constitutional law scholar Cai Dingjian by Mike Dowdle of National University of Singapore. (It's at the end of the book review.)

Talk at GWU Law School by Prof. SHEN Wei on local government debt

Prof. SHEN Wei of Shanghai Jiaotong University Law School will give a talk at GW Law School this Thursday evening. The topic is "Understanding China's Local Government Debt Crisis: Causes and Solutions (or No Way Out?)". Click here for a flyer and a bio of Prof. Shen. The talk will be recorded and webcast live; here's the link for the webcast.

Date: April 3

Time: 6 p.m.

Place: Room 402, Lerner Hall, 2000 H St. NW, Washington, DC (Lerner Hall is where you are when you enter the law school at the 2000 H St. entrance).

"A Constitution Without Constitutionalism?" Talk by Prof. Zhang Qianfan of Peking Univ. Law Faculty

As announced earlier, Prof. Zhang delivered this talk at GWU Law School last Wednesday; here's the URL to a very nicely produced recording. Many thanks to our AV department!

Confucius Institutes in US universities: two views

Confucius Institutes, which are part of the Chinese government's soft power efforts, have been in the news recently (at least in the academic community) following this blast last fall by the noted University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins. I recommend it.

At the same time, I also recommend this recent and very cogent response by my GWU colleague Ed McCord, which he has kindly consented to have me post here. It's must reading for anyone who wants to have a fully informed view.

[Feb. 16: Replaced earlier version of McCord piece with a later, slightly modified version.]

English translation of Xu Zhiyong verdict now available

Here it is: brought to you by the ChinaLawTranslate web site.

Zhang Qianfan talk at GWU Law School: live webcast

I posted yesterday about Prof. Zhang's upcoming talk at GWU Law School (Feb. 12th, 6 p.m. EST); here's the URL to the live webcast. The talk will also be recorded and made available on line; URL to be announced.

[Post slightly edited and URL changed after initial posting.]

Recording of Teng Biao talk at GWU Law School

Last week Teng Biao gave a talk at George Washington University Law School; here's a link to a recording of the talk.

Zhang Qianfan to speak at George Washington University Law School on Feb. 12th

Professor Zhang Qianfan of Peking University Faculty of Law will speak at George Washington University Faculty of Law on Feb. 12th. His subject will be "A Constitution Without Constitutionalism? Paths of Constitutional Development in China." Details here.The talk will be webcast live; please check back to this blog for the URL, which I will post before the talk.

For those who don't know him, Prof. Zhang is an impressive guy. In addition to a Ph.D. in government from the University of Texas at Austin, he also has a Ph.D. in physics/biophysics from Carnegie-Mellon. He recently published a book in English on the Chinese constitution.