By Jerome A. Cohen

Here is Charles Parton’s article in yesterday’s Financial Times on “What the coronavirus crisis tells us about Chinese governance,” in which he lists the dangers that have been revealed by China’s treatment of the crisis (spoil alert: “The police are dangerous,” among others).

We did not, of course, need the virus to tell us the PRC police are dangerous, but it has certainly provided yet another occasion for vividly demonstrating that proposition. The whistleblowers, the late Dr. Li Wenliang and his colleagues, got off easy. They could have been “disappeared” indefinitely like the missing independent journalists covering the crisis. They could have been sentenced to four years in prison like legal scholar/activist Xu Zhiyong, who has just been recaptured after criticizing Xi Jinping’s handling of the crisis and now faces a much stiffer punishment. They could have been spirited away for six months of incommunicado detention by the local “supervisory commission” before even being handed over to the formal criminal process (note that a more senior National Supervisory Commission posse was subsequently sent down to Wuhan to dole out harsh sanctions as needed, with no participation of prosecutors, defense lawyers or judges required). Or Dr. Li and his colleagues could have been “released” by the police but neutered at home under severe restrictions and stigma that would have assured their permanent de facto “non-release” (but that would, ironically, have saved his life).

This lawlessness is not new. Many of us can recite examples over the decades. I remember years ago the explanation given me by the Shanghai police when, in the courtyard of his apartment building, I asked what authority they had for preventing me from visiting the apartment of disbarred lawyer Zheng Enchong, who had recently been “released” from prison after a three-year term for sending a message to a foreign human rights organization. The several public security officers simply kept repeating “we are police” (women shi jingcha), plainly implying that this was all the authority needed to justify their interference with legitimate human contact!