Word: lawing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...law, no heaven" is an old Chinese way of describing lawlessness...
China's new rulers might put it more practically: no law, no Four Modernizations program to improve agriculture, industry, defense, and science and technology. "It is essential to strengthen the socialist legal system if we are to bring great order across the land," says Chairman Hua Kuo-feng. That means assuring bureaucrats, intellectuals and skilled workers essential to China's development that they will not be summarily sent off to the rice paddies or driven to suicide, as they often were under Mao. Fear of government highhandedness, party leaders now admit, has been running rampant. To boost morale...
...creating a rule of law will be difficult for a country that has had virtually no formal legal system for almost two decades. After they came to power in 1949, the Communists issued some Soviet-style statutes, but the system withered away during the Cultural Revolution. Public trials were few and mainly for show; lawyers were almost nonexistent, and judges were largely untrained hi the law. In the late '60s the Peking People's Daily ran an editorial titled "In Praise of Lawlessness," condemning law as a bourgeois restraint on the revolutionary masses...
...China never has had much use for formal litigation and lawyers. Ever since Confucius, the Chinese have valued collective harmony over the assertion of individual rights and the adversary system now characteristic of American justice. Lawyers did not practice privately in China until after the 1911 Nationalist revolution, because laws banned the "fomenting" of litigation, lest it disturb the smooth fabric of Confucian society. "It is better to enter a tiger's mouth than a court of law," goes another Chinese proverb...
...Gang of Four, who have yet to be tried, more than two years after they were arrested. "Our struggle against the Gang of Four is a very sharp and complicated class struggle, a life and death struggle," says Chang Chunglin, a deputy director of research at Peking's Law Institute, "and people who have experience in such struggles know quite well that they are difficult to deal with and still go through all necessary legal procedures." Until recently the "enemies" made up as much as 5% of the population, but the list has been shortened this winter as various...