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

compliment to outsiders amounted to a political smear within the Party itself, akin to a candidate from the religious right in the USA being outed on election eve as pro-choice. The source of the compliment didn’t help either, as Wang Juntao had been imprisoned and then sent into exile for his role in the 1989 protests.
    In pronouncements on the legal system the Party regularly reiterates the law’s place in the political pecking order. Judges must remain loyal–in order–to the Party, the state, the masses and, finally, the law, according to the report issued to the National People’s Congress in 2009 by the Supreme People’s Court. As Li discovered, up-and-coming leaders perceived to be toying with this hierarchy do so at considerable political risk. ‘This was hugely damaging for Li inside the Party,’ said another classmate. ‘The hardliners are very suspicious of such views.’ In the end, Li fell short of his ambitions at the congress, walking into place at the Great Hall of the People in the Politburo parade one step behind rival Xi Jinping, who became Hu’s heir-apparent in his place.
    The career of China’s chief justice, Wang Shengjun, nominally the most senior judicial officer in the country, embodies the values of this legal system admirably. Wang has never studied law, and ascended to the post in 2008 through a career in provincial policing in central Anhui province and then the state security bureaucracy in Beijing. Apart from a degree in history, interrupted by the Cultural Revolution, Wang’s only other education has been at the Central Party School in Beijing. To use an American analogy, it would be like appointing a former bureaucrat in charge of policing in Chicago to be the US Supreme Court Chief Justice on the basis of his success, first at fighting crime in the mid-west city and then managing a division of the Justice Ministry as a partisan political appointee in Washington. The analogy is not exact. The Chinese Supreme Court is not like its US counterpart. It has hundreds of judges and performs administrative functions as well. But, broadly speaking, the comparison holds. In the Party’s view Wang’s political credentials made him perfectly qualified for the senior legal job.
    Wang performs another important role at the court, by hosting foreign judges and lawyers visiting China, as their nominal counterpart in the legal system. To arrange meetings with the most senior and powerful figure in the legal firmament, Zhou Yongkang, is awkward, as he does not occupy any formal government office that publicly identifies him as the country’s chief law officer. Zhou, who sits on the nine-member Politburo Standing Committee, is responsible for the vast state security apparatus, including the police. He also chairs the Party’s Central Politics and Law Committee, the country’s supreme legal authority which supervises the courts, the police, the Justice ministry and the legislature, the National People’s Congress. His appointment as head of the committee was announced cursorily in the state media after the 2007 congress, but otherwise his work and speeches are largely directed internally, to party organs, not the public at large.
    Senior leaders stand constant guard against encroachment on the Party’s power through western notions of competitively elected parliaments and an independent judiciary. In the space of a few months in early 2009, two members of the Politburo inner circle made highly critical speeches about western democratic governance. In one, Jia Qinglin warned that China needed to build a ‘line of defence to resist western two-party and multi-party systems, a bi-cameral legislature, the separation of powers and other kinds of erroneous ideological interferences’. Luo Gan, a member of the Politburo Standing Committee until 2007, was even more explicit. In a speech published before his term finished, Luo conceded that Chinese courts had to keep pace with international trends