Law and Politics in Modern China: Under the Law, the Law, and Abo ...

follow separate channels (markets) and flow according to separate rules, interacting only occasionally, in China, money, power, and law circulate within a singular channel that is managed by the same group of people. As a result, the rapid pace of economic development has widened the gap between the people who have everything and those who have nothing. The gap is also widened between powerful and influential people with their pre-laminated entourage of economic and political hangers-on, and those whose basic rights are constantly violated and even nullified. Through a careful manipulation of an always-revocable financial or political license, each layer of Chinese influence is effectively managed by the layer immediately above it. This creates a limited vision in which the individual only comprehends those portions of society that are at the same level as he is and the levels immediately adjacent to this position. Hence, the Chinese concept of “place” emerges, offering support to the general administrative structure from the bottom.

Political corruption inevitably creates a level of under law. Chinese under law does not carry the same meaning as the English term outlaw, which means ‘people who break the law’. Chinese under laws are people who are neglected or left out of the rule of law. In most cases, they are repressed and stripped of their entitled rights because someone who is more powerful wants to acquire a larger share of rights to increase his or her influence. The majority of Chinese citizens do not believe that they are born with rights, as most Westerners do. Human rights as universal entitlement is a concept that remains alien to the Chinese mind. After several thousand years of such repression, the common Chinese have cultivated a tolerance or even numbness towards inequitable treatment and corruption. They have come to accept a highly fluid scheme that simultaneously degrades (or harvests) individual entitlement to rights (in the Western sense) and redistributes them as privileges within a politically expedient superstructure. Unequal rights have become the norm, and they are heard and seen inconspicuously, and are acknowledged only subconsciously by the collective.

Based on this level of social consciousness (or rather unconsciousness), Chinese social change has been unconstitutional (in the English