Experts speak on possible future of Chinese legal system

The panel was moderated by Evans Revere GS ’94 and included Jacques deLisle, a Penn law school professor and director of the Asia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute; Amy Gadsden, also a Penn professor and former State Department official; Susan Pologruto, a Rule of Law Advisor for the U.S. Agency for International Development; and Yanfei Ran, a Chinese lawyer and assistant to the District People’s Procuratorate Office in Beijing.

DeLisle stressed that though China’s “laws on the books are pretty darn good, they’re not very well implemented.” He also described the large gaps between the educational levels of legal professionals, especially judges, in urban and rural areas.

Pologruto discussed the U.S. government’s increasing support for USAID’s work promoting the rule of law in China, noting that USAID has implemented pilot projects like legal aid services and administrative law clinics. “USAID is providing these pilot programs and trainings in China so they can actually replicate them, so we can have an exchange of ideas, possibly introduce something new and then — with their own money and resources — replicate and reproduce them in their own context.”

Ran, who has practiced law in China for 12 years, discussed her personal observations and struggles with the lack of rule of law in the Chinese legal environment, describing defendants who were tortured and kept in secret facilities.

Ran closed her remarks by thanking audience members for caring about China and urging them to get involved in improving the situation. “If you have any chance ... just do something for China,” she said.

Gadsden, the panel’s final speaker, talked about the changes in China’s attitude toward the rule of law in the past 30 years. “There is an assumption in rule of law that it is a precursor to legal reform ... I think what is potentially happening in China is the reverse,” she said. Echoing deLisle, she said that while laws and professionals already exist, the Chinese government must begin to develop the rule of law in practice.

John Monagle ’12, a Wilson School major, attended the panel because it was related to his concentration, Chinese-American relations. “I thought it was fascinating to see clearly very different perspectives — some from academics, some from practitioners.”

“There are a lot of laws there, but not the expert reinforcement,” Monagle said. “I thought the speakers did an excellent job in outlining some of the problems, the future and some of the reactions, and what’s going to be necessary for a better Chinese future.”

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While the panelists did not explicitly allude to it, the panel’s subject was especially timely given the detainment of the wife of Xiaobo Liu, the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner, last Sunday.

In an interview after the panel, Pologruto called the government’s reaction “unfortunate.”

“The broader impact would be it doesn’t seem like this is changing,” she said.