In Part 3, I talked about the differences between the Constitutions of the United States and China.
Another sign of China becoming a more open society comes from the Global Integrity Report, which shows America’s overall score in 2009 as 85 compared to China’s overall score of 60.
China legal system had an integrity score of 76.
Consider that China didn’t have a legal system when Mao died— it was a shambles. China had to build a legal system from zero and make it fit the Chinese culture.
I doubt that China will end the death penalty, and I’m sure that China will lead the world in executions for many years to come.
However, recently, several crimes that led to the death penalty were removed from that list and the law was changed so only China’s highest court could hand out a death sentence to a convicted criminal.
Business law was developed first because of world trade and China’s entrance in the WTO.
China integrity score also has inched upward on an annual basis.
In 2007, China’s score was 55, which is considered very weak. However, in 2008, the score was 59 — up 4 points and in 2009, it improved a bit more to 60.
Progress with a country of 1.3 billion people takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight.
Return to Growing Cautiously Into a Modern Republic – Part 3
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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True, but also of note in the Global Integrity Report: China is the gap between the legal framework and implementation. In other words, as laws are added, do practices actually change? In our experience watching these issues, once that gap becomes entrenched it is very, very difficult to change even if all manner liberal institutions should be written into law. A key factor is whether citizens (in practice, that means the press) can hold government accountable for these shortcomings. In China, that’s to be determined.
Cheers,
Jonathan at Global Integrity
Thank you. In China the press belongs to the government but Blogs and e-mails do not. More citizens are connected to the Internet than any nation and those numbers are growing. The press in China may not be the factor that causes change as much as popular Blogs and e-mail networks, which demonstrated their power in recent months when there were a flurry of labor protests and strikes throughout China demanding more pay, which the government supported against the business sector.
There have been other incidents where Blogging and e-mail campaigns have brought about change or rolled back an unpopular policy. One took place in southeast China in a city popular with tourists. When the central government planned to build a chemical plant in this city, people Blogged then sent millions of e-mails protesting the factory and the plans were cancelled. Then when a national law was passed to require wearing safety helmets on bikes, there was another Internet protest, which caused the government to cancel that law.
If there is such a thing as a free press in China, it is growing in Blogs and according to what I’ve read, there are more Blogs in China than anywhere else on the globe.
The people have always been the key to change in China. We shall see if using the Internet to generate a different forum for news and information will do the trick. There is a growing movement in China to combat corruption in the government and business sector, which has generated change in the legal system.