After 35 Years, High Court Goes Public in China

The People’s Supreme Court of China set a precedent over the weekend: It handed down its first public opinions in more than 35 years.

Since the Communist Party takeover in 1949, China’s highest tribunal had operated behind a veil of total secrecy. Its opinions, when they were issued at all, were distributed “through restricted channels”--meaning that neither foreigners nor ordinary Chinese had the right to see them.

On Saturday, the court lifted the veil just a trifle. It published a neatly bound 29-page communique containing both general legal pronouncements and also its written opinions in four individual cases. Court officials said they intend to hand down public decisions at least three more times before the end of the year.

No Landmark Opinions

By American standards, the decisions are not earthshaking. No John Marshall or Oliver Wendell Holmes has yet emerged in the People’s Republic of China. The opinions are short and unsigned--and there are no dissents.

The Chinese Supreme Court did not try to rule on what the nation’s top leader, Deng Xiaoping, or the Communist Party is legally empowered to do. Nor did it venture into civil rights or civil liberties issues.

Nevertheless, the four decisions made public provide a glimpse of China’s revitalized legal system and the kinds of disputes it is handling these days.

The Chinese courts appear to be trying to decide how often the death penalty should be imposed. They are also wrestling with bitter arguments over ownership of private property and with money disputes arising from China’s new system of profit incentives.

One of the cases announced by the court involved a particularly brutal rape-murder. Fan Ming, 18, a railroad worker from a town near Peking, and his friend, Liu Xilong, 17, were convicted of raping a 17-year-old girl and then killing her because they feared she would tell the authorities. They choked the girl unconscious and left her on the railroad tracks where she was run over by a train.

The Supreme Court upheld the trial judge’s conclusion that both defendants should be sentenced to death but that Liu, because he was under 18, should be granted a two-year reprieve to show that he has rehabilitated himself. At the end of such a reprieve, Chinese courts usually lift the death sentence.

Capital Punishment Set Aside

In a second homicide case, the court held that capital punishment should not be imposed on Su Feng, 29, a former construction worker from eastern China who voluntarily turned himself in to police last fall for a murder he had committed five years earlier.

In 1979, Su became enraged after his former lover, a woman named Wang, broke off an affair with him. He broke into the house where Wang and her sister were sleeping, picked up a stick and attacked them, killing the sister and leaving his former girlfriend permanently blind in one eye.

According to the court, Su then fled to the mountainous province of Shanxi in central China. Using a false name, he found a job, got married and had two children. Two years ago, he wrote to his parents to tell them he was still alive, and the parents, after visiting him twice, persuaded him to surrender.

The Supreme Court decided that Su had committed intentional murder and was therefore subject to the death penalty. However, the judges agreed upon a sentence of life imprisonment because he had turned himself in and because “he showed a willingness to repent his crimes.”

China’s highest court said that its decisions in these two cases should be used as models by judges in other cases--thus apparently sending out the message that not every person convicted of murder should be executed.

At present, China is one of the world’s foremost practitioners of capital punishment.

Last fall, Liao Beiya, director of the research center for the Supreme Court, told The Times that China hopes to begin limiting use of the death penalty to murder cases. However, execution placards around China make clear that criminals are still being put to death for rape, robbery and other crimes.

The most unusual opinion issued by the Chinese court came in a case that grew out of the Communist regime’s new economic reform program.

Last year, a plastics factory in the city of Nanjing signed a contract promising one of its workshops special wage incentives and a 40% share of profits if the shop made 40,000 yuan (about $14,000) in 1984.

The workshop easily passed the goal in the middle of the year, whereupon factory officials demanded that the original contract be modified. The workshop refused and filed a lawsuit seeking to have the contract enforced.

Goal Called Too Low

The factory’s defense was that the original target of 40,000 yuan had been too low--and that anyway, the factory had helped the workshop get its materials at a special low price. The Supreme Court rejected these arguments and ruled in favor of the workshop.

The decision followed the lines of a series of recent warnings in the Chinese press that local factory workers and other officials must honor the contracts they have signed.

On Monday, Supreme Court officials refused to meet with a foreign correspondent to explain why, after 35 years of secrecy, they have decided to begin issuing public opinions.

However, the China Daily, a government-controlled publication, quoted an unnamed court official as saying that the tribunal wants “to provide better guidance to local courts for correctly applying laws and decrees.”

The People’s Supreme Court has 90 judges, who meet in small panels to decide cases.

Only rarely have the judges played a prominent role in Chinese political life. Once, a Supreme Court president issued a public plea that criminal cases should stop being submitted to Communist Party committees for their approval.

On another occasion, in 1978, after the end of the Cultural Revolution, the Supreme Court sponsored a special conference to expose what were called “the crimes of the Lin Biao-Jiang Jing counterrevolutionary cliques.” Jiang Jing is the wife of the late Mao Tse-tung and a prime force behind the Cultural Revolution. Lin Biao was defense minister and one-time No. 2 power under Mao.