AFP: Rule of Law Not Much Closer in China Despite WTO Membership

Friday, 05-Sep-2003 5:01AM

BEIJING, Sept 5 (AFP) - Rule of law remains a distant prospect in China 21 months after its entry into the World Trade Organization, and those who expected revolutionary changes were kidding themselves, according to observers.

China has been careful to make only the legal revisions that were explicitly required as a condition of joining the Geneva-based trade body, avoiding a more sweeping transformation of its legal system.

"China has done only the things called for by the WTO," said Ling Bing, a law professor at City University of Hong Kong.

Among the reforms introduced are rules allowing individuals and companies to bring lawsuits to courts if they are not happy about administrative decisions made in WTO-related fields.

WTO membership has also resulted in a slew of law amendments in areas such as intellectual property rights and regulations on particular industries, such as telecommunications and insurance.

But legal reform in a broader sense, going beyond rule-making in the commercial, investment and foreign trade field, has not taken place.

"In more domestic legal areas, civil law, criminal law and administrative law, I haven't seen significant changes as a result of WTO membership," said Ling.

"WTO rules don't govern all aspects of social and economic life in China. My perception is that people had too much of an expectation of WTO membership, " he said.

For any society, laws are the most fundamental rules of the game, and overnight change is unlikely to happen.

But in China, this is compounded by the dominance of a communist party seemingly bent on staying in power and loth to implement too far-reaching change, according to analysts.

"The basic principles of China's legal system haven't changed, and they're not going to change with the one-party system," said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, director of the Hong Kong-based French Center for Research on Contemporary China.

"It's going to take time, but it's not just a question of time, it's a question of political system. Here, we're reaching the boundaries of the current political system in China," he said.

China's legal system is saddled with a host of problems, many of them reflecting the fact that there is no tradition of an independent judiciary.

Local judges are hired and paid for by local governments, making for a tight, symbiotic relationship.

This also means that WTO reforms, such as the possibility of court probes into trade-related administrative acts, may be hard to implement, according to observers.

China was relatively active in pursuing legal reform in the first year after its entry into the WTO, while 2003 has seen a slowdown, according to Leila Choukroune, a lecturer on international law at the Sorbonne University in Paris.

Not all of it was the result of any deliberate intention to stall the process.

No one could have foreseen the shutdown of much of society that was caused by the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) earlier this year, she said.

Another reason was the transfer of power to a new generation of political leaders, which also entailed an important revamp of China's economic decision-making bodies.

For instance, the Ministry of Foreign Trade, which had overseen the last difficult part of China's WTO entry negotiations, was replaced by a Ministry of Commerce, a super-agency also in charge of domestic trade.

"The year 2003 has been a bit confused," said Choukroune. "It's still confused who is who, and who is doing what."

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