Ling Li Quotes
The anticorruption campaign has created a lot of resentment and disincentives among public officials. Political discipline is to repress that resentment and to recreate an incentive for public service.
Communist Chine, faced with massive corruption by local Communist Party officials and an ever more knowing and angry public, had created and given enforcement teeth to a national anti-corruption program.
Li, Ling. "Politics of Anticorruption in China: Paradigm Change of the Party’s Disciplinary Regime 2012–2017." Journal of Contemporary China, vol. 28, no. 115, Routledge, 2019, pp. 47-63.
This was a private speech he made to his corruption inspectors. At this point in time, there was extensive corruption of the millions of local officials of the ruling Communist Party then a generation of two from the idealism of the original communists who fought in the Chinese Revolution. The common people were beginning to complain and demonstrate against local officials who were making things worse by what even the heavy handed Chinese party leaders considered heavy handed. The inspectors were coming under great pressure as the anti-corruption campaign was producing a blowback from local officials and the corrupt officials were so numerous that they could represent a destabilization threat in a political culture where stability was the highest priority. The anti-corruption campaign was an attempt to regain “party discipline”. See Quotation 643893.
“Magistrate” historically has had a political meaning of the chief executive of a political entity. Mayors are still referred to as the “Chief Magistrate of the city.” The President is sometimes referred to as the “Chief Magistrate.” Lower magistrates can be political appointees who have power and responsibility for governing as well as judges of courts to whom the term “magistrate” refers in most modern references. The older use of the term harkens back to a time when there was no separation of powers and the assembly was the legislative, executive and judicial powers all at the same time.
Often a constituent will send a politician a gift, which most politicians have learned to decline. Brown attached this note to all such returned items:
She was a judge and a prosecutor before she had been a member of Congress.
Islamic modernists like Serageldin are many among the educated Muslims but their views are often drowned out by the violence and extremist statements of the fundamentalists. Even in England it is difficult to expose corruption because of the libel laws. In most countries, it is almost impossible which is one of the reasons corruption is so widespread. American law says that it is better to mistakenly hurt some public figures’ reputation than suppress the ability of citizens to criticize and expose corruption.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
- Born:
- Nationality: Chinese
- Profession: Historian & Legal Scholar
Ling LI is a visiting professor of Chinese history and law from October 2015 at the University of Vienna. She obtained her doctoral degree from Leiden University Law School in the Netherlands in 2010. Prior to her PhD study, she taught various courses on Chinese law at the Northwest University of Political Science and Law in China. Between 2010 and 2015, she worked as a senior research fellow at the US-Asia Law Institute of New York University School of Law and remains as a non-resident fellow of the same institute. She has done extensive research on corruption in China and the Chinese political legal institutions. Her current research interest is contemporary Chinese politics and law, especially the rules of the Chinese Communist Party as an institution.
