Road ahead for rule of law in China is long and twisted

IN mid-April, the Foreign Correspondents Club of Hong Kong sponsored a lunch talk on rule of law in China. What set this talk apart was the speaker: Wang Zhenming, head of the Law Department of the Liaison Office of the Central People's Government in Hong Kong.

This was the first time that an official of the office had ever spoken at the club and, understandably, the room was packed. The speaker, who is also dean of the law faculty of Tsinghua University, spoke candidly. He said that in the first three decades of the People's Republic of China, formed in 1949, politics dominated and there was no rule of law. There were only two laws, the constitution, which was frequently changed, and the marriage law.

Then, from 1979 on, for three more decades, Prof Wang said, economics dominated as the country focused on development.