Government lawlessness presages weakness and stagnation.
It paralyzes the search for truth, invention and innovation. It awakens popular resentments which find expression in sabotage and an unwillingness to fight for keenly execrated rulers.
Soldiers serving under lawless regimes exhibit the esprit de corps of mercenaries.
Accordingly, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is a paper tiger, exemplified by its 1979 military defeat by Vietnam and inability to suppress chronic revolts or anti-government violence by Tibetans or Uighurs.
Chinese law is to law what untruths are to truths — antonyms.
Every year is a banner year for Chinese prosecutors. Conviction rates invariably exceed 99.9 percent.
Fear pervades Chinese society.
Political dissent above the inaudible is criminalized. Advocacy on behalf of a defendant is illegal — indistinguishable from the prohibition of defense counsel by French Revolutionary Tribunals during the Reign of Terror. The law is whatever the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wants it to be: a jumble of political calculations with ulterior motives.
Last Thursday, the CCP announced legal changes that will not diminish its industrial scale lawlessness. Judges will remain notorious errand boys for government officials or the CCP glitterati.
The CCP Central Committee propagandized that placing the party above the law empowered to kill, detain, torture, arrest, or imprison would enable the people to control their lives: “Socialist rule of law must uphold the party’s leadership, and party leadership must rely on socialist rule of law. Only with government according to the law, and implementation of rule of law under the party’s leadership can the people truly be masters of their home.”
That Orwellian nonsense prompted Hong Kong human rights lawyer Teng Biao to write that the Chinese government’s courtship of the rule of law is “like a rooster dreaming that he can lay eggs.”
Chinese government lawlessness, including the suppression of free speech and association a la the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, begets intellectual backwardness prone to staggering dishonesty. That explains why the lion’s share of China’s intellectual property is stolen. You will not find a Steve Jobs or Thomas Edison in Beijing or Shanghai.
Chinese officials habitually lie to conceal errors or the absurdity of utopian CCP dogmas. Thus, during the Great Leap Forward, officials reported bumper crops while tens of millions were starving to death. At present, CCP local potentates misreport the genuine grievances of Tibetans and Uighurs to propitiate the supreme arrogance of Han Chinese rulers. The consequence is greater bloodshed, violence, and alienation that convulses Tibet and Xinjiang and weakens China.
Chinese lawlessness carries its own partial antidote. It frightens neighbors into hostile opposition to China’s military ambitions repulsed by the idea of living under the thumb of the CCP.
Japan is willing to fight China over the Senkaku Islands. Vietnam is willing to fight China over the South China Sea. Taiwan is willing to fight over its independence from China. India is willing to fight over its borders with China. South Korea is willing to fight China over the Yellow Sea. The Philippines is willing to fight China over Scarborough Shoal.
The antagonism or skepticism toward China displayed by its neighbors would not diminish if the United States withdrew its troops from Japan and South Korea and dispensed with its respective defense commitments. The neighbors naturally would want our money and military forces if a conflict with China erupted into war, but they would fight on with resolve in any event — just as Great Britain defeated Nazi Germany in the Battle of Britain without the United States or France.
The only thing that can save China from self-destruction on the installment plan would be President Obama’s pivot to Asia to ally with China’s rivals or adversaries. It would unify the divided Chinese people behind the CCP just as NATO expansion up to Russian borders unified the Russian people behind President Vladimir Putin.
The CCP’s lawlessness will keep China permanently weak without our help.
For more information on Bruce Fein, visit brucefeinlaw.
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