Ye Meng & Dr. Junyang Wang ; Yan-ho Lai; Ye Meng
Ye Meng
University of Tuebingen, Year 2 Ph.D. candidate in Chinese Studies/Political Science
Dr. Junyang Wang
Shandong University
Anti-Corruption in Authoritarian Context: An Institutional Analysis on China's New Supervision Commission and its Limits
This paper examines the institutional design and political impacts of the new Supervision Commission(SC) as China’s latest attempt to institutionalise and centralise its formerly fragmented anti-corruption mechanism. Since Xi Jinping took office, over two hundred high-profile politicians have been removed by an incomparable anti-corruption campaign. Moreover, Xi also attempts to further push anti-corruption in a long-term perspective, most notably by establishing the new SC, partly following the Hong Kong model of Independent Commission Against Corruption. We ask whether this institution will be able to enhance the independence and effectivity of the Chinese anti-corruption mechanism and why it can or cannot do so.
Official statements claim that the reform will expand the jurisdiction area of the supervision organ by including the government as an object of supervision and thus fundamentally enhance the supervision organ’s operational independence. Yet we argue that it can hardly meet the anticipation of effectively combatting corruption. The new SC does not bring any substantial, structural change to the incumbent system in which every government entity is assigned and reports to a corresponding Party (sub-)committee. This is the system through which China’s Party-state essentially functions and has maintained its authority throughout all political and social arenas. The new SC is, as was its predecessor, assigned to the Party Committee for Discipline Inspection, which still reports to the Party Secretary at the respective level. In short, both the subject and the object of supervision remain under the authority of the Party Committee and its Secretary. With this constellation unchanged and the Party Committee at each administrative level still being the ultimate decision-making body over all core issues including personnel and finances, the new SC can hardly exercise supervision and investigation independently from the pool of government officials and party cadres that it is supposed to hold accountable of.
Yan-ho Lai
Year 1 PhD in Law, SOAS
Neutralising Contentious Politics in Hybrid Regime: Role of Law in Post-colonial Hong Kong
Abstract
Purpose - Rule of Law and judicial independence are seen as essential values for the judiciary in liberal democracies, and give confidence to protestors and civil disobedient in access to justice. On the contrary, law and courts in authoritarian regimes are often regarded as political instruments of the state to preserve their power and suppress political mobilisation. However, the roles and impacts of law on contentious politics under hybrid regime is under researched. The purpose of this paper is to study the different tactics of hybrid regime to cope with contentious politics by legal means through the case study of Hong Kong.
Design/methodology/approach - The author suggests that, under favourable historical, cultural and geopolitical conditions, hybrid regimes can repress political opposition by legal instruments without creating political instability. By using a method of triangulation between archive, media and case law, the author traces the institutional setting of post-colonial Hong Kong as a case and evaluates the tensions and struggles between the judiciary, the state and political opposition before and after the Umbrella Movement.
Findings - Rather than simply criminalising protests, the government of Hong Kong is able to suppress the opposition camp by a strategy of “depoliticisation and neutralisation” by local laws. The tactics include marginalising the radical opposition by commercial laws and administrative discretion, ending the occupy movement by civil injunction, neutralising protests by shifting the political goal to procedural and executive arrangement, and seeking interpretation of the Basic Law as pre-emptive actions against the local courts. These tactics pose limits on judicial independence and reinforce the state’s capacity to use law as decrees for maintaining its authority. The success of such tactics can be attributed to the colonial history of Hong Kong, its conflicting legal culture, and geopolitics between Hong Kong and China.
Originality - Instead of doctrinal legal research, the interplay between history, culture and geopolitics offers an alternative perspective to understand hybrid regime as a strategic agent who engages in contentious politics with the authority of law.
Keywords - Law and Politics, Hybrid Regime, Contentious Politics, Hong Kong, China
Ye Meng
University of Tuebingen, Year 2 Ph.D. candidate in Chinese Studies/Political Science
Between Judicial Autonomy and Party Authority: China’s Current Judicial Reform and its Impacts
This paper contributes to the literature on judicial performance in authoritarian states by examining the implementation mechanism and institutional impacts of the current judicial reform in China, specifically regarding the judicial system’s role in maintaining the Party-state’s authoritarian resilience.
On the one hand, with China’s slowing economic growth and rising social inequality, the CCP is in need of a reconfiguration of its performance legitimacy. Legal accountability has thus become an outspoken policy priority in the current reform period. On the other hand, it has become increasingly indisputable that the Xi-era is characterized by political recentralisation and a strictly top-down mode of policy implementation. The Party-state is thus pursuing after so-called „ruling according to law“ (Yifazhiguo) while simultaneously making every effort to maintain and even to enhance the CCP’s absolute authority. This is particularly paradoxical as some of the official goals of the judicial reform, including de-politicization and higher autonomy for the judicial system, seem to be inconsistent with the overall institutional changes towards recentralisation.
Against this backdrop, this paper traces how such paradox unfolds itself during the implementation process of the current judicial reform and how power constellations among involved political-legal institutions are being altered. Based on fieldworks in the past two years in China, I argue that the judicial system has gained more autonomy in the current reform, albeit mostly in a functional rather than institutional way. This is to be analysed against the background that, in line with the general political development, reforms towards higher institutional autonomy for the judicial system are overshadowed by recentralisation and stricter Party authority. As a result, judicial institutions are becoming more deeply absorbed by the Party-state’s conflict and social unrest resolution system, following a rather political than judicial logic.