China’s ‘rule by law’ affects local freedom

The ‘rule by law’ paradigm followed by Beijing authorities is already leading to the restriction of freedom in the MSAR, University of Saint Joseph (USJ) professor Émilie Tran told Macau Daily Times.
USJ is holding the international conference ‘China 1911-2011: From Revolution To Reforms’ under the theme ‘Characterizing Made-in-China Transition Paradigms’ today and tomorrow.
Despite its move into capitalism and a more open-market economy, China has so far not followed the ‘rule of law’ system used in democratic Western countries, Tran said.
Although the Communist Party has followed the thread of constitutionalism, “the rule of law is yet to be seen,” she offered.
“No opposition is allowed and the revamp of the legal system reinforced laws that are later used in crackdowns in order to assert the authorities’ power. In our conference program we decided to call it ‘rule by law’,” the political affairs expert said.
This paradigm explains “some censorship, some restriction of freedom that we see on a daily basis” in Macau, she added.
Tran stressed the “limited powers” that both the Audit Commission and the Commission Against Corruption have, compared to their Hong Kong counterparts.
In addition, the HKSAR has already defined a road towards democracy but has refrained from enacting the controversial anti-subversion article 23 of its Basic Law. In Macau, she emphasised, there is no vision for political reform but the national security law was easily approved.

Beijing model

The USJ conference will look at the future of China and also “to what extent China has developed its own economic, social and political model, challenging the existing models,” the executive coordinator of the USJ Centre for Global and Strategic Studies said.
And this has been “a hotly debated issue,” for which “there is no consensus even among Chinese scholars,” she added.
But Tran believes “we are at a turning point for both China’s development and our own social theories”. The scholar stressed that this week’s reported riots “were very significant because they were the first to involve only Han Chinese, not ethnic minorities”.
Over the weekend hundreds of people – mostly migrant workers – rioted in Xintang town, a denim garment district in the Guangzhou metropolitan area, over the alleged assault of a pregnant street hawker during a police operation.
Still, the fast growth of the Chinese economy has other countries looking enviously at the mainland. But so far the Beijing authorities have been cautious enough to say there is no Chinese development model, Tran said.
“It all depends on whether China will market its model, because all the other countries are looking at China, especially the ones with a populist drive,” she added.

V.Q.