The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers by Richard McGregor

But they cannot sue the Party, because there is nothing to sue. ‘It is dangerous and pointless to try to sue the Party,’ He Weifang, at the time a law professor at Peking University, one of China’s oldest and most prestigious educational institutions, told me. ‘As an organization, the Party sits outside, and above the law. It should have a legal identity, in other words, a person to sue, but it is not even registered as an organization. The Party exists outside the legal system altogether.’ The Party demands that social organizations all register with government bodies, and punishes those which don’t. The Party, however, has never bothered to meet this standard itself, happily relying on the single line in the preamble of the constitution, about its ‘leading role’, as the basis for its power.
    In a country which claims to be building a more open society based on the rule of law, the authorities do not appreciate anyone highlighting this embarrassing legal vacuum. Professor He, for one, was almost arrested after an attack he launched on the Party at a private meeting in 2006 was leaked on the internet. ‘The Party is an organization without legal basis that violates individual freedoms and tramples on the law,’ Professor He had said. ‘The Party is always clamping down on the media and grabbing power. What kind of a system is this? It seriously violates the [Chinese] constitution.’ A transcript of this private, informal gathering, known as the ‘west mountain meeting’, after the location where it was held in Beijing, was posted on the web by enthusiastic students who had attended and taken notes. The content of the meeting infuriated leftist critics of the reform camp. An anonymous reply posted soon after on the website of the China Academy of Social Sciences, one of the country’s leading state think-tanks, said Professor He and the reform group that organized the conclave had conspired to set up ‘a shadow political party, unregistered, but existing in reality’. In Chinese terms, this was a dangerous slander, akin to an accusation of subversion. It was also luridly hypocritical, because it so precisely echoes the criticism made of the Party itself.
    Since Mao substituted revolutionary committees and arbitrary violence for due process and left the legal system in ruins, the Party has adopted a more sophisticated approach to the law, enlisting it as an ally to help manage a complex economy, rising social tensions and abuses of administrative power. Legal intellectuals increasingly have the ear of the leadership, which publicly espouses support for harmonizing Chinese legislation with global standards. The Politburo now includes law graduates and economists, chipping away at the overwhelming dominance of engineers. But while it promotes the law, the Party has made sure that it has expanded alongside it. About one-third, or 45,000, of the 150,000 registered lawyers in China as of May 2009, were party members. Nearly all law firms, about 95 per cent, had party committees, which assessed lawyers’ pay not just according to their legal work, but to their party loyalty as well. Far from being a weakness, the Party considers its penetration of the legal system to be a core strength. A retired judge in Chongqing, a vast metropolis in western China, recounted the response he got when he objected to interference of party officials in his court rulings. ‘You call it interference,’ the official replied. ‘We call it leadership.’
    In the lead-up to the 2007 congress, former classmates of Li Keqiang, a provincial leader favoured by Hu Jintao to succeed him, spoke admiringly of his liberal legal education in the late seventies. A one-time university colleague from Peking University, Wang Juntao, recalled Li’s open-mindedness on campus and his support for ‘constitutional government’, code for backing the independence of the executive, the parliament and the judiciary. What might have seemed like a