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Can we trust courts to order demolition?
By Wang Yong |
December 16, 2010, Thursday
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SICK of living in a city that is crowded, polluted and overrun by materialism, my friends and I sometimes talk about toiling our way into a kinder, gentler and cleaner life on rented farmland.
We all love the idea but I have a concern that deflates everyone: What if village officials suddenly decide to cancel our rental contracts and bulldoze our new country houses into flat land for commercial or industrial development? And thus line their own pockets?
My fear is not groundless. Earlier this month, some village officials in Jiangsu Province razed the houses of hundreds of villagers without an agreement to vacate.
Shivering in the teeth of winter, some homeless villagers had to eat and sleep in a pigsty.
But those poor farmers were far from the most miserable in a series of lawless land seizures and demolitions around China, where unscrupulous officials rival each other to shovel farmers off their land in their zeal for urbanization and industrialization.
Can any sensible person entertain dreams today of a cleaner, idyllic life in China's countryside?
In today's lead opinion article, we see that Chinese legislators and law experts are trying to tame the executive branch of local government (village officials are certainly part of it) by giving the judicial branch (ie, courts) the final say on whether a house shall be demolished by force.
While checks and balances of power are better than none, there's a caveat here. The latest legislative efforts only target properties on state-owned land - ie, land mainly within city limits - and largely leave out those on farmland that is collectively owned by farmers.
In other words, a mayor will have to ask a judge to approve a proposed demolition, but a village head need not seek higher approval.
A greater caveat: the latest legislative efforts simply move the power to demolish from mayors to judges; these efforts do not yet address the power of the public to know and to participate.
What if mayors and judges connive at the expense of the public?
This is far from a big "if" - judicial corruption is no news.
In 1803, American chief justice John Marshall wrote: "It is emphatically the province and duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is." A hidden assumption here: judges must be clean and independent.
When officials and judges work hand-in-glove against the public interest, it should be emphatically the province of the public to say what the law is.
We all love the idea but I have a concern that deflates everyone: What if village officials suddenly decide to cancel our rental contracts and bulldoze our new country houses into flat land for commercial or industrial development? And thus line their own pockets?
My fear is not groundless. Earlier this month, some village officials in Jiangsu Province razed the houses of hundreds of villagers without an agreement to vacate.
Shivering in the teeth of winter, some homeless villagers had to eat and sleep in a pigsty.
But those poor farmers were far from the most miserable in a series of lawless land seizures and demolitions around China, where unscrupulous officials rival each other to shovel farmers off their land in their zeal for urbanization and industrialization.
Can any sensible person entertain dreams today of a cleaner, idyllic life in China's countryside?
In today's lead opinion article, we see that Chinese legislators and law experts are trying to tame the executive branch of local government (village officials are certainly part of it) by giving the judicial branch (ie, courts) the final say on whether a house shall be demolished by force.
While checks and balances of power are better than none, there's a caveat here. The latest legislative efforts only target properties on state-owned land - ie, land mainly within city limits - and largely leave out those on farmland that is collectively owned by farmers.
In other words, a mayor will have to ask a judge to approve a proposed demolition, but a village head need not seek higher approval.
A greater caveat: the latest legislative efforts simply move the power to demolish from mayors to judges; these efforts do not yet address the power of the public to know and to participate.
What if mayors and judges connive at the expense of the public?
This is far from a big "if" - judicial corruption is no news.
In 1803, American chief justice John Marshall wrote: "It is emphatically the province and duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is." A hidden assumption here: judges must be clean and independent.
When officials and judges work hand-in-glove against the public interest, it should be emphatically the province of the public to say what the law is.
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