By: Jianli Yang
People who are friendly to China are sometimes called panda-huggers, and Julie Harms learned the hard way that pandas belong to a kingdom governed not by the statute law, but by the law of the jungle.
Born and raised in Texas, the thirty-one-year-old Julie has a master’s degree in international relations from Harvard University and was the co-editor of the 2001 travel book, Let’s Go China. She visited China several times, both as a tourist and on business. During these visits, she and a handsome Chinese man fell deeply in love. They planned to marry in the spring of 2007.
Unfortunately, Julie’s fiancé, Shiliang Liu, is an ordinary Chinese citizen from an ordinary family in an ordinary village in an ordinary county of an ordinary province. “Ordinary” means that the family does not have reliable ties to anyone in power, which in turn classifies Liu and his family as prey, like pandas, rather than predators in the wild. Just weeks before Julie’s wedding, one of Liu’s relatives, a 10-year-old boy, had a childish quarrel with a neighbor’s boy whose family had connections with local authorities. Trying to resolve this trivial dispute peacefully, Mr. Liu was beaten so badly by the boy’s family that he had to be taken to the hospital. Shortly after he was released by the hospital, Mr. Liu was detained without bail by the county police on fabricated evidence and then indicted by county prosecutors on false charges. The wedding never happened.
Typically, Chinese families in Liu’s situation would pursue what has proved to be the path of least resistance for over 3,000 years: bribe the local officials and beg for lenient treatment and/or sentencing. Sometimes, however, the bribes sought by officials are more than the victimized families can afford. Families then have a choice; either accept the circumstances they’ve been dealt, or “petition” to higher level governmental agencies at their own cost and risk. “Petitioning” means traveling to the provincial capital or Beijing to stand in line—or even camp in line—for several hours or several days or several weeks just to get registered with an underpaid receptionist in a rundown office on a back street. Even after all of this, the chances that a case will receive proper consideration remain close to zero.
For the last six months, Julie Harms, refusing to bribe local officials, has been doing nothing but this kind of petitioning. She even went so far as to send a letter to letter to the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, and his visiting US counterpart, President Barack Obama. So far she has been stonewalled at every turn. To punish her non-submissive attitude, the local Chinese court recently delivered a harsher than normal sentencing of ten months in prison to Mr. Liu.
Here’s how the Chinese government rules the jungle: at any given level, from nation to the village, whoever is technically in charge (governor, mayor, town manager, etc.) is actually only boss number two. Boss number one is without exception the Communist Party secretary. The secretary has two key lieutenants on his staff: One is the governor, mayor, town manager and such, who is in charge of commerce and business. The other is typically called The Political and Judiciary Commissar, who is in charge of public security. Very often, this commissar also assumes the position of the police commissioner, who appoints two of his own lieutenants to the positions of district attorney general and chief judge of the court. You read that right, the chief judge and the attorney general report to the police chief of their judicial district!
Policemen can thus search any house and arrest anybody at any time without worrying about niceties like proper search warrants. With rare exceptions, verdicts and sentences are determined long before trials take place, depending on what kind of connections the defendants and plaintiffs have, or how much they pay in bribes. “Jury trial” is a term that cannot be found in a Chinese dictionary. Justice and fairness are something ordinary citizens like Julie’s fiancé can enjoy only in their dreams.
Julie and Liu’s family are appealing the court’s verdict and stepping up their “petitioning” efforts now. Let’s all pray and wish our Julie good luck. And let’s also remember, when you visit China, it is probably safe to see a panda in the zoo. But if you want to hug one, be careful—it’s a jungle out there.