Ed Morrison · More on corruption in China

July 31st, 2009

This week in Xi’an, I am receiving a graduate education in Chinese corruption networks. I understand more fully how they form, how they operate, and why they are so difficult to eliminate.

In the United States, we have federal prosecutors who represent “the people” with the right to examine the behavior of our local elected officials. If they have a reasonable basis to believe that illegal activity has taken place, they can appeal to the federal court to obtain the authority to wiretap and seize documents. That’s exactly what’s taking place now in Cuyahoga County.

In the United States, independent federal prosecutors give both form and substance to the rights of the people to oversee the activities of public officials. That is why it is particularly dangerous for political officials to politicize the office of Federal prosecutors, as the Bush administration apparently attempted to do. (New revelations out only yesterday indicate that Karl Rove played a more detailed role in the dismissal of federal prosecutors that he has admitted.)

The independent power of the federal prosecutor, supervised by the federal court, to investigate public officials provides a critical check on the power of public officials.

If you read the Chinese constitution, the people are also given the right to oversee their local political leaders. Yet, the constitutional right of the people to oversee their political leaders is never realized. The Communist Party is in the position of overseeing itself. There is no independent government prosecutor. There is no court system independent of the influence of the Communist Party.

There is no independent power for a representative of the people to seize records or wiretap telephone calls. There is no way for the people to shine a light on the networks of corruption that inevitably emerge when flawed human beings, avaricious and ambitious, assume the power of public office.

It makes you marvel at how a small group of political leaders in 1787 came up with such a brilliant solution.

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