Blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng writes in today’s New York Times that the “fundamental question” China must face is lawlessness. “China does not lack laws, but the rule of law,” he writes in an op-ed.
Although China’s criminal laws, like those of every country, are in need of constant improvement, if faithfully implemented they could yet offer its citizens significant protection against arbitrary detention, arrest and prosecution. Countless legal officials, lawyers and law professors have labored for decades to produce constitutional and legislative rules intended to prevent a recurrence of the nightmarish anti-rightist campaign and other “mass movements” of the 1950s and the later abominations of the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76.
