Metro Metrics

“The worst thing about Beijing is that you can never trust the judicial system. Without trust, you cannot identify anything; it’s like a sandstorm … Everything is constantly changing, according to somebody else’s will, somebody else’s power.”

These are the words of the famous Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei, who recently published a piece in Newsweek about the two-faced reality of life in contemporary Beijing. In an article that is sure to enrage Chinese authorities, he is talking about the corruption and the injustice of a fickle justice system where the lives of powerless citizens are in the hands of government bureaucrats who own the law.

A lawlessness that is especially pervasive on a local level, leading to many questions about the nature of local governance in China.

In such a large and diverse republic, it is not feasible, nor advisable, that all matters of importance should be decided in the capital, where people without intimate knowledge of varying local conditions design one-size-fits-all policies that will have immensely different consequences in different parts of the nation.

Just like in the similarly enormous USA, Chinese states and municipal governments should be given room to explore a wide range of ideas and act as laboratories of policy (Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’ “laboratories of democracy” will have to wait for a while, but policy is a good start) so that effective state and local governments can, not only take local conditions into consideration, but also lead by example. Innovative localities can take charge of their own destiny and allow more economic and individual freedom by, for example, implementing local migration, school, labor and birth policies. Or, more humdrum, local property rights, environmental and safety regulations, building codes etc.

Thanks to decentralization, one state or city can show the rest of a region and the country the benefits of a new approach and force others to follow if they want to stay in the development game. A classic case of efficiency-increasing jurisdictional competition á la Charles Tiebout, where companies and citizens vote with their feet and leave corrupt backwaters to seek a new life in a better governed, and more successful part of the country. At least in theory.

In a reality where China lacks accountability measures, localization is likely to take a much darker turn. After the Chinese empire collapsed in the early 20^th century, the country lost decades to civil war where the breakdown of central government led to the rise of a long line of regional warlords who did whatever they pleased with the territory they controlled. It was an intense form of legal sandstorm, where no one knew whose will or whim would affect your life.

This anarchy was what the communist party fought and defeated, which is why Beijing is incredibly rattled that a China of local chiefdoms may be resurgent, and that erratic and unjust local governments will undermine the people’s faith in the party’s ability to maintain stability and growth, prompting Beijing to try such extreme measures as capital punishment in order to discourage corrupt bureaucrats from abusing their powers. But with little effect, other than that local officials become less overt in their ransacking of the public purse and use of their powers over property rights and the legal system to enrich themselves.  Since they know that there is no way for the federal anti-corruption authorities in Beijing to register every act of official misconduct in such a vast nation as China where millions of people are involved in corrupt activities. The capital’s resources will only allow them to go after the big game – people who have ended up in the Corruption Hall of Fame – leaving thousands of local emperors to continue undermining the people’s trust in the “harmonious society”.

The reason that countries like the US managed to rid its state capitals and city halls of corruption, and countries like Mexico failed, was because thousands of individual citizens could go above their local authorities’ heads when they misbehaved to get help from an accountable and independent federal judiciary and law enforcement that was beyond local governments’ control.  Thereby, the US didn’t need to rely on a small group of anti-corruption officials to uncover and punish every local power-plot, but utilized the force of the masses as well as a free press of muckraking journalists. Without a strong and independent federal judiciary, local government officials all over America would have had no far-reaching independent authority to fear, and Americans would have had no far-reaching independent authority to rely on when some Peckerwood Caligula of a governor, mayor, city councilman or sheriff decided to interpret the law in accordance with his or her personal interests.

And herein lays the problem for Beijing. Hu Jintao desperately wants to rein in corrupt officials in order to protect the party’s autocratic hold on power, but the only way of doing that is to create an independent judicial authority that the party can’t control.  A judiciary that may be intended to singlehandedly pursue cases of corruption, but that certainly would become a refuge for a thousand and one unforeseen complaints that the party would rather deal with behind closed doors.

Which is why Chinese law is likely to remain an ever changing sandstorm and why a majority of Chinese local governments will continue to be seriously flawed.

Beijing has more problems than smog and traffic