"Rules of the Game," by Evan Osnos, The New Yorker

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August 4, 2009



A Chinese lawyer uses the court to challenge policies he considers unfair and illegal, and he lands in police custody. Another Chinese lawyer uses the court in a similar spirit and earns a balanced story about him in a state-run newspaper. What’s the difference between them?

Nobody really knows these days. But finding the line on any given day is the central question facing Chinese lawyers and advocates at a moment in Chinese history when the boundaries of dissent are defined more by rules of thumb than by the rule of law. In the days since Xu Zhiyong, a prominent public-interest lawyer, was detained last week on suspicion of tax evasion, his case has emerged as a test of how China’s commitment to promoting the rule of law will unfold. (A few new details have emerged about Xu’s case.) Curiously, the Global Times, a new state-run English-language paper, chose to publish a story Tuesday about another lawyer, Xie Yanyi who reportedly “filed a lawsuit against Li Yizhong, the Industry and Information Technology minister, for infringing upon citizens’ freedom and privacy.” The “audacious legal action” is “in retaliation to the government’s plan to install all new computers in China with a filtering software program which can monitor an individual’s Internet use.”

Xie is no stranger to “audacious legal action,” and history suggests that his lawsuit will not get far. One rule of thumb is that legal actions against the state, even if technically permitted, rarely go anywhere. Then again, the filtering software known as Green Dam is just unpopular enough with Chinese Web users that maybe a pocket of the leadership will try to earn some populist capital by letting the case go for a while. Another rule of thumb, after all, is that the leadership recognizes the volatile power of Chinese Web users, and might be eager to let off some steam. So, who knows? If China achieves the rule of law that it avowedly seeks, this will someday be an answerable question.