To resolve China's dilemma of trusting petitions over the law, the rule of law must be deeply rooted in people's hearts.
[Sharp Commentary on the Spirit of Rule of Law at the Fourth Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee]
According to incomplete statistics, China currently has over 30 million petitioners traveling to party and government departments at all levels each year. This massive, long-term petitioning group demonstrates the lack of rule of law in China and the reality that the public generally trusts petitions over law. Undoubtedly, this is an important aspect that needs to be addressed in China's judicial field. However, to reverse the reality that the Chinese public trusts petitions over law, it is necessary to establish a belief in law in people's minds, with the core issue being that the judiciary must truly reflect fairness and justice. To implement judicial fairness and justice, we can try to start from the following three aspects.
First, conduct a nationwide campaign to clean up laws and regulations: review all regulations formulated and implemented in the past, and comprehensively re-evaluate them based on whether they reflect fairness and justice.
Second, re-evaluate and establish judicial institutions and procedures: abolish those institutions and procedures that hinder the reflection of fairness and justice, and promptly establish those mechanisms that are missing due to historical reasons but are beneficial to ensuring the realization of fairness and justice.
Third, strive to implement citizens' right to freedom of speech, ensuring that social supervision keeps the media independent: in modern civilized rule-of-law countries, besides the separation of legislative, judicial, and executive powers, there exists a fourth power reflecting citizens' freedom of speech—the media. Therefore, media independence and judicial independence can become the two wings that jointly ensure the realization of fairness and justice in society.
From the above, it can be seen that to achieve social fairness and justice, efforts must be made in several major areas such as legal embodiment, judicial guarantee, and social supervision, rather than being limited solely to judicial access, judicial procedures, and judicial authority.
For China over the past half-century, where various movements and events have led to intensified social conflicts, widespread unrest, and deepening social crises, using the judicial mechanism to resolve these accumulated social ills and alleviate social grievances is certainly a proper path. However, how to quickly reverse the current situation where people prefer petitions over trust in the law, and implant the awareness of trusting, respecting, abiding by, following, and solving problems through the law into people's minds, is clearly crucial for advancing the construction of a rule-of-law society in China. The most effective way to reverse this public sentiment of distrust in the law is to let the law truly resolve the grievances of the people, allowing them to vividly see the realization of fairness and justice, publicly rehabilitate and exonerate those who have suffered persecution and injustice, restore their innocence, rehabilitate their reputation, compensate their losses, so that fairness and justice are truly embodied in citizens, and society genuinely feels the authority of the law in upholding fairness and justice.
If this can be achieved, society can truly establish reverence for the rule of law as the embodiment of fairness and justice, elevate law and the rule of law to the height of citizens' value beliefs, and fundamentally reverse the situation of preferring petitions over trust in the law. (Wang Debang)
