Show trials of lawyers marks de-politicization of post-Tiananmen civil society

You wouldn't expect praise for Xi Jinping to come from someone being jailed by the communist regime, but at the announcing of his seven-year verdict for subversion, that's what controversial civil rights lawyer Zhou Shifeng supposedly did:

The court said he thanked late paramount Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping for reforms that made his "development" possible.

"The second person I would like to extend my gratitude to is Chairman Xi Jinping," it cited him as saying. "His national strategy to implement the rule of law has made China stronger."

Of course, these statements should be taken with a heavy grain of salt: even if true, they can't be considered purely voluntary. The motives to sweet-talk Xi's administration are quite obvious for anyone in such a situation.

But they do reveal an undeniable reality: with Xi's anti-corruption campaign close to being permanently institutionalized, there's less and less left for independent lawyers to actually do in terms of policing the party and the state which the party and the state won't do on itself - eventually at least.

Though rarely acknowledged in Western media, in key ways the graft-busting crusade has been a remarkable success exceeding mainstream expectations. Its punitive measures have been so widespread and severe, even at the magisterial and ministerial levels, that the outwardly visible culture of corruption has been fundamentally altered. Officials have grown noticeably more cautious and frugal - often to a fault. The corruption remains, for sure, but it's become like the Italian mob in New York City under prosecutor Dewey, or even the Russian oligarchs under Putin: it's been forced to go low-key, at least for the time being. For any society, that's really about the best you can hope for.

That leaves China's post-Tiananmen civil society - more specifically, its most politicized segments - at a loss for relevance. Their whole raison d'être has been that they must police the state because the state (and party) can't police itself; but now that the party-state's internal watchdogs are actually exercising their teeth, they come off as more nuisance than help, even with those in the government who may have formerly seen their role as legitimate.

Post-Tiananmen civil society has thus effectively been de-politicized. Civil society still exists, but now only as an adjunct to absolute communist party authority. One could argue that it never really wanted to be political anyway, in that it never had any intention of challenging communist rule; this misses the point, which is that it always operated under the assumption that private citizens had legitimate constitutional rights to bring charges against officials and the state. It's this fundamental assumption which Xi Jinping's party has overruled: since the party and state can still discipline themselves to be more responsive to the people, that precludes the people acting autonomously in contravention of the political monopoly.

In other words, the party still knows what's best for China, and until such time as the country's socioeconomic transition really comes off the rails, its citizens had better accept it.