Word: systemic
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...experts caution that China still needs a wholesale examination of how its legal system handles detainees. A report released Nov. 12 by New York-based Human Rights Watch describes a system of "black jails" in Beijing and provincial capitals that operate outside the law, though with the implicit approval of police and judicial officials...
...According to the report, the black jails are generally used to detain people who travel to Beijing and other cities to petition the government for redress of injustices faced in the countryside. The control of court systems by local officials means that they can't find justice at home. They often come to bigger cities with stories of official corruption, illegal land seizures or workplace inequities. The petition system, a remnant of the Qing Dynasty-era letters-and-visits system, is wildly ineffective, with just 3 out of 2,000 cases resolved, according to one study. Still, for poor Chinese...
...These are unlawful, secret detention facilities that are not under any due legal process. The detainees don't have access to lawyers. They are stripped of their mobile phones. They're not able to contact friends and families. People in black jails are not part of the Chinese judicial system. It's a legal black hole...
...painful irony of the black jails is that they sprang up after an earlier effort by Beijing to reform the national detention system. In 2003 a migrant worker in Guangzhou named Sun Zhigang was beaten to death while in police custody. Sun, who had been stopped for not carrying his temporary-residence certificate, was detained under a system known as "custody and repatriation." That system, a series of detention centers as well as the legal framework to hold people on administrative charges, was used to round up vagrants, beggars and petitioners...
Critics of the authoritarian Chinese government would say it's a system more accurately called "can do - or else." And they have a point. No one in the U.S. would argue that it should adopt China's dictatorial style of government. America doesn't need to displace tens of thousands of people in order to build a massive dam, as China did in Hubei province from 1994 to 2006. (The value of checks and balances is, in fact, among the many things China could learn from the U.S.) But you don't have to be a card-carrying communist...