SHANGHAI—The Communist Party is embarking on an unconventional strategy to build public confidence in rule of law: strengthening the powers of a secretive investigative body it controls.
Legal reform is high on the agenda of an important planning meeting of the Communist Party under President Xi Jinping set to gather in Beijing next week. A key goal for the party’s top 200-some members is to sustain a corruption crackdown Mr. Xi launched as his signature domestic policy in assuming power around two years ago.
Experts say the way forward includes bolstering the party’s investigative agency, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.
With unresolved decisions looming in the background about how the party will handle a clutch of historic alleged corruption cases, in particular that of former Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang , the country’s leadership is signaling a change in tactics. Instead of periodic thunderbolts to take down big targets like Mr. Zhou, China’s former domestic security chief, the party is positioning the commission for ongoing, more institutionalized investigation.
“What they’ve done in the past is launch campaigns. It’s on and off,” said Wang Yuhua, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “Now it’s about centralizing the power to Beijing, and maybe one person,” he said.
That would be Mr. Xi, the dominant figure in Chinese politics.
The meeting, called a Central Committee plenum, will endorse rule of law and constitutional government as concepts to pursue while preserving the party’s leading role in guiding how the systems develop.
Some analysts expect that the directives that emerge from the plenum will feature streamlining for the party’s fragmented and localized antigraft bodies to make the commission a true national watchdog organization. They say it will also endorse experiments meant to insulate prosecutors and judges from some interference from local officials, the way courts are already going on some business-related proceedings.
None of this will make the legal bodies independent from party control.
During Mr. Xi’s campaign, the commission has gained widespread public approval by reprimanding at least 40 senior officials and tens of thousands of members overall.
With the crackdown, political leaders signal that China’s economy can no longer afford rabid corruption. As the official Xinhua news agency put it in announcing the plenum outline, the leadership “agreed that the rule of law is a must if the country will attain economic growth, clean government.”
Researcher Minxin Pei, now with California’s Claremont McKenna College, says the direct annual cost to China’s economy from fraud, kickbacks and other corruption is multiples higher than his estimate five years ago of $86 billion.
A sustained anticorruption push would be good for business, encouraging investment, according to financial firm Reorient Group Ltd. The Hong Kong firm’s China economist, Steve Wang, says a purge of top railway ministry officials that began a few years ago helped make railroad equipment suppliers one of Reorient’s favorite investments because now they can be valued according to their “fairly decent” technology, instead of their political connections.
Of the corruption crackdown, said Mr. Wang, “We want it to be as permanent as possible.”
The party’s top leadership linked plans to merge the anticorruption strategy with the broader rule-of-law issue by announcing the choice of a plenum theme just minutes before revealing their agreement July 29 to investigate Mr. Zhou for what Xinhua reported were “serious disciplinary violations.”
Mr. Zhou, who hasn’t been seen in public since October 2013, hasn’t been charged and couldn’t be reached to comment. Other cases related to the current campaign include a former top general and senior party officials from the energy industry.
Public announcement of an investigation into a senior political figure usually leads to a trial in China, where courts are tightly controlled by the party and the conviction rate in criminal cases is more than 99 per cent, according to lawyers and legal analysts.
Highlighting how no one of Mr. Zhou’s rank has faced such an inquiry in decades, China’s party leadership portrayed the investigation as proof the law applies to all.
Some legal analysts counter that the case illustrates limitations of Beijing’s definition of rule of law, since there is little doubt Mr. Zhou’s fate is at least in part a political decision.
Foreign legal experts also disparage the commission as an instrument of rule-of-law because its targets enjoy no due process.
Guarded by military units, the commission operates behind a green-tiled arch in Beijing with such secrecy no signs identify its headquarters complex.
Fear is the commission’s calling card, according to lawyers. It enjoys power to disappear party members for months of interrogation without lawyers. The process is termed “shuang-gui,” which means double-designation in reference to when and where a suspect is ordered to report to the party investigators.
A construction contractor who visited a shuang-gui interrogation center near Beijing said the facility resembles a hillside villa community from the outside but jail cells from inside. Evidence gathered during these detentions becomes the basis for any subsequent prosecution in court against a suspect.
Its activities put the commission “in conflict with the idea of moving toward the rule of law,” said Nicholas Howson, a law professor at the University of Michigan.
Under President Xi’s choice to run the Commission, Politburo Standing Committee member Wang Qishan, it has taken small steps from the shadows by hosting a website that features regular announcements. It has also set an expanding footprint. Its name appears outside new buildings along two leafy Shanghai blocks, including one in a former French-run jail dating to the city’s time as a colony decades ago.
The commission is fragmented, with offices nationwide that answer to local party authorities, so teams from Beijing swoop in to investigate major cases. But to engender loyalty to Beijing, the commission’s institutionalization drive has included appointing its own people to local level antigraft agencies. By earlier this year, it had done so in about a third of China’s provinces, according to research by University of Hong Kong’s Fu Hualing.
