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45 Colum. J. Transnat'l L. 114 (2006-2007)
Using Law for a Righteous Purpose: The Sun Zhigang Incident and Evolving Forms of Citizen Action in the People's Republic of China

handle is hein.journals/cjtl45 and id is 120 raw text is: Using Law for a Righteous Purpose: The Sun Zhigang Incident and Evolving Forms of Citizen Action in the People's Republic of China KEITH J. HAND* The Chinese goverinent's rule of law campaign has cre- ated greater awareness of legal issues and generated bot- tom-up pressure for legal change. This dynamic was high- lighted in April 2003, when Chinese media reports on the death ojfa young man named Sun Zhigang while in police custody sparked a public outcry. This public pressure, coupled with a groundbreaking citizen legal challenge, eventually prompted China's State Council to dismantle a controversial form of administrative detention called custody and repatriation. The Sun Zhigang incident demonstrated that by leveraging a wave of media cover- age and public opinion in a case of mass coucern, co- opting laws and official rule of law rhetoric, formulating a technical, well-grounded legal appeal within the system, and focusing oi modest legal reform goals that did not challenge findamental state or Party interests, lawyers could successfully accelerate legal reform without trigger- ing the type of claniaging backlash directed against other, more politicized citize actions. Althou~gh reforniers failed in their secondary goal oJ creating a precedent fbr Na- tional People's Congress annuhnent of an administrative regulation, their efibrts had broad impacts ini promoting the development of constitutionalismn, generating political pressure for law enforcement rejorns, creating an elm- hanced sense of citizen empowerment, aid providing a * Senior Fellow, The China Law Center, Yale Law School and Visiting Scholar, Bcijing University Law School; former Senior Counsel, Congressional-Executive Commission on China, Washington, D.C. I would like to thank John Balzano, Jennifer Choo, Michael Dowdlc, Fu Hualing., Paul Gewirtz, Jonas Griniheden, Bruce Hand, Jamie Horsley, Walter Hutchens, Maggie Lewis, Benjamin Liebman, Ethan Michaelson, Carl Minzner, Eva Pils, and Wang Qinghua for their detailed and valuable comments on this article. I would also like to thank Yale Law School, Boalt Hall, and Comell Law School for invitations to present this research. These events provided valuable opportunities for feedback and discussion. Finally, special thanks go to the editors and staff of the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law for their outstanding suggestions and editing work. I am responsible for all errors and omissions. Portions of this paper draw on meetings and discussions with Chinese rights lawyers from 2003-06. Due to the sensitive nature of the issues involved, where such discussions are cited, the names of the participants have been omitted to protect their confidentiality. The Columbia Journal of Transnational Law and the author have decided to omit URLs in citations where the source can readily be located either by searching Google using the author's name and the name of the article or by referring to the news service cited. The Journal will retain a printout of each such Internet source cited this way for one year. Thereafter, readers should contact the author for verification of these sources. 2/4/2007 4:29:55 PNI HAND

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