This article examines the CCP's “falun gong problem” with reference to PRC law and policy on “heretical cults,” paying particular attention to the implications of this problem for the ongoing struggle to establish human rights under the rule of law. Official PRC commentary contends that the falun gong not only committed criminal acts but also wilfully sought to undermine the rule of law itself. Human rights critics and agencies, such as the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, have, on the other hand, attacked the PRC for a “repressive legal framework” that threatens human rights. The “falun gong problem” is an important chapter in the struggle for the rule of law in China, and it appears that the law has not been able to transcend the conceptual bias of past criminal law on counter-revolution. The related politicization of the law through a revived principle of “flexibility” challenges the internal process of criminal justice reform and the recent reform focus on the balance of human rights protection and public order.
The reference to the "perfecting of a system of social protection" is integral to recent legislation on minors, women and the handicapped, but it is perhaps best expressed in Article 2 of the Law on Protecting the Rights and Interests of Women. Western scholarship which deals with the state-society paradigm in China often comments that the Chinese political culture has tended to merge state and society into a continuum of political and social activity and that despite the growth of market relationships the conceptual notion of "civil society" lacks a strong indigenous equivalent. For a selected list of references on civil society see n. 41.
This article surveys the Chinese response to SARS in law and politics. Over the course of the spread of SARS the party-state qualified legal reform strategy that was designed to provide new human rights protection and to curtail the state's arbitrary resort to policy and regulation without the benefit of law. This immediate response revealed the underlying problems of rule-of-law making, but the experience of SARS later informed the creation of new and improved law on infectious disease that reiterated the original assumptions of legal reform within a newly developing approach to the public management of health crises.
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