Chinas Judicial System Is Becoming Even More Secretive
Human rights activists hoped to demonstrate that this was not just an isolated incident, but a systemic problem that the local government was ignoring. In fact, Fengxian County, where the woman lived, had a reputation for allowing the kidnapping and selling of men who wanted to have children.
During the CJO's research, lawyers uncovered at least two previous cases in which abducted women had asked for divorce in Fengxiang but had been rejected; They also confirmed that people accused of human trafficking in the county received fewer prison sentences.
CJO exhibited similar problems outside of Fengxian, showing a trend across China. An analysis of 1,480 human trafficking cases published in CJO found that a third of the cases involved women with mental disabilities and that the women were often sold for less than $10,000. All this information is obtained from publicly available documents.
When this was revealed, many people thought that human trafficking was a thing of the past in China. The CJO's posts then contributed to the largest social movement in the country in recent years, with people repeatedly naming the Fengxian woman and demanding explanations from the government for months.
CJO has served many other purposes over the years. Activists took advantage of this to denounce the criminalization of the persecution of Uyghurs and online protests in Xinjiang. In fact, it has become an important source of information for Chinese businesses because it tests people's trust to evaluate whether a company is trustworthy.
But everything started to change around 2021.
Analysis of data by He Haibo, a law professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, shows that annual convictions against OJCs will peak at 23.3 million cases in 2020. By 2022, this total will have decreased by 62 million. %, to 8.9 million. In the year he also pointed out that in 2022 there were only 854 administrative cases (the government is the defendant), which is only a fraction of the 670,000 administrative cases brought to court this year.
At the same time, the CJO also started losing cases massively. In a three-month period in 2021, CJO administrators canceled more than 11 million cases citing the need to move the system. According to a research project conducted by Benjamin Liebman, a law professor at Columbia Law School, in the 12 months between 2021 and 2022, 9% of criminal convictions were expunged from the database. Some minor crimes have been completely deleted from the platform. This is a common cover for the persecution of Chinese dissidents, including the "illegal production or sale of spy equipment" and "inciting hostilities and incitement."
