9/21/2005 04:33:18 PM|||The Zen Master|||This expose by Joseph Kahn in the Times on China's legal system makes it seem like the Cultural Revolution never ended. Stories of suspects under interrogation being forced to do the "airplane"--a form of torture from that bloody era of grassroots denunciation, public humiliation, and indiscriminate violence that entails tying a person's arms together behind and above their head and leaving them that way for days, often resulting in dislocations or fractures--in this day and age are truly shocking, especially when China has been so good at pretending to the world that true change has taken place. Still, this analysis, run through with the narrative of a man who was forced to confess to a murder he did not commit, and who was later cleared through the discovery of definitive evidence that he was not the perpetrator, proves all the diplomatic hype on the part of the communists to be dead wrong, and shows us that the kid gloves with which the leaderships of real democratic states treats China are exactly that, a means of protecting their pockets and wallets from the wrath of a country that could leave their citizens naked if it so desired. The man whose story this article foregrounds, Qin Yanhong, had a far more personal taste of the gangrene gnawing at China's legal system than I ever hope to get: "Our public security system is the product of a dictatorship," Mr. Qin wrote his family when he was on death row. "Police use dictatorial measures on anyone who resists them. Ordinary people have no way to defend themselves."
Still, it is hard to remember that this is what the legal infrastructure of the country in which I now reside looks like, when all I see on a daily basis are high-rise construction sites that grow by stories every day, ads for "Intel Inside" computers and Dream satellite television, and websites for ordering international takeout with SMS order confirmation (see this earlier entry).|||112729159849481577|||Why not to get arrested in China