Misdeeds Rumored as Chinese Minister Quits

China’s justice minister has stepped down, ostensibly for health reasons, but his departure has prompted speculation about possible misdeeds in office.

Gao Shangli, 63, who was midway through a five-year term as head of China’s legal system, left his job sometime in the past several days and is now “resting,” a ministry spokesman said Friday.

But a news report out of Hong Kong alleged that Gao had been detained by authorities for questioning about “economic and political problems” while he was in office--possibly activities back in his native Shandong province, where he served in a variety of government positions.

Temporarily taking over Gao’s duties is Zhang Fusen, who has been appointed the ministry’s Communist Party secretary and who is a former deputy party boss of Beijing, the spokesman said.

As justice minister, Gao had the difficult task of overhauling the country’s inefficient, tangled and politically subordinated legal system. That assignment was part of the Communist regime’s stated attempt to institute the rule of law. In recent months, Beijing has stressed the importance of legal reform so it can live up to its obligations once China enters the World Trade Organization.

At the same time, the government has continued to wage an aggressive campaign to root out the Communist Party’s endemic corruption, one of the public’s top grievances. The Chinese leadership has been engaged in a delicate balancing act as it prosecutes some high-profile cases to demonstrate its commitment while keeping investigations from reaching the party’s highest echelons.

Gao was one of the new faces brought into the Cabinet of Premier Zhu Rongji in 1998 as part of a much-ballyhooed changing of the guard that reflected Zhu’s reformist leanings. He is the second minister to leave Zhu’s government under a cloud. Two years ago, Water Resources Minister Niu Maosheng was demoted after inspectors uncovered enormous malfeasance at his ministry.

Before becoming justice minister, Gao served for nearly five years as a vice president of China’s highest judicial body, the Supreme People’s Court in Beijing.

If reports of his detention are accurate, Gao will find himself at the mercy of the same system he was responsible for shaking up and putting right.

While officials have had sporadic success in updating antiquated laws, training lawyers and judges in professionalism and increasing legal awareness, reforms have been hampered by corruption and a long history of the system as a tool of the Communist Party, not an impartial arbiter of the law.