Wang Zhenhua is one of China’s wealthiest businessmen. He is the chairman of property developer Future Land Development Holdings, one of the fastest growing home builders in China.

Wang is also a child molester. He was arrested in Shanghai in July 2019 after a nine-year-old girl notified her mother that Wang had molested her in a hotel room.

In a country in which a private chat among doctors in Wuhan about COVID-19 can be monitored and its participants proactively reprimanded, it is difficult to believe that no one in a position of authority knew of Wang’s perverse proclivities prior to his arrest.

Nevertheless, after some initial censorship surrounding the case, China’s Central Legal and Political Affairs Commission stepped forward to denounce Wang, calling his behavior “dirty and obscene”.

Wang learned his fate for his crimes this past Wednesday: five years in prison. This is an obscenely light sentence.

It is at first shocking to think that someone could face just five years in prison for molesting a nine-year-old girl, an experience that undoubtedly changed that child’s life forever, and a reality that she and her family will have to deal with for the rest of their lives.

The sentence however becomes even more shocking when we consider the prison sentences handed down in China for the type of non-criminal activity that the Party loves to punish unforgivingly.

Take, for example, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo: in 2008, a few months after the world gathered in Beijing for the Summer Olympics, Liu collaborated with China’s most engaged public intellectuals to draft Charter 08, an ambitious proposal for a peaceful political transition.

For exercising his legally protected free speech, Liu was sentenced to eleven years in prison on charges of subversion. Liu’s prison term, more than twice the length of Wang Zhenhua’s, would be coming to an end this year had he not died of untreated liver cancer in 2017.

Or let us consider the case of Ilham Tohti. Born in Xinjiang, Tohti became a respected professor of economics. He advocated for mutual understanding between Han and Uyghurs, and called for the implementation of genuine autonomy in Xinjiang.

For his activism, Tohti was given a life sentence on charges of separatism in 2015: if Wang had been tried that same year, his sentence would already be coming to an end, but Tohti’s will not end until he either dies or the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) collapses. Meanwhile in Tohti’s homeland of Xinjiang, millions of Uyghurs are being held indefinitely without charges or legal proceedings in concentration camps.

These examples show all too clearly that the Chinese authorities consider the exercise of free speech guaranteed in the constitution far more dangerous than a sixty year old man molesting a nine year old.

These sentences also show that when the CCP wants to send someone away for a long time, they have a way of making sure that happens, setting aside even any legal procedure. So when they do not send someone away for a long time, they clearly have no desire to do so.

In contrast to the sad state of affairs in China’s courts and prisons, which produce more injustice than justice, Hong Kong has long taken pride in its rule of law based system. And rightfully so: this system took decades of genuine hard work and sacrifice to build.

The CCP is however intent on destroying these institutions. Last year they tried with the extradition amendment, which was ultimately abandoned after months of protests. This year they are trying to force a National Security Law on Hong Kong overnight, bypassing all standard legal and political procedures, to target four supposed offenses: secession, subversion, terrorism, and collaboration with foreign forces.

The ways in which these charges are abused to persecute those who hold divergent political opinions in China is a disturbing sign. Both Liu Xiaobo and Ilham Tohti were charged with subversion and silenced forever simply for exercising their constitutionally protected rights to free speech.

The CCP’s decision to force its draconian National Security Law on Hong Kong forces every citizen to face a troubling question: are you comfortable with Hong Kong’s institutions being subsumed by a legal system that sends Nobel Peace Prize Laureates to their death while giving child molesters a slap on the wrist? Are you comfortable in the hands of a system that kills Liu Xiaobo and coddles Wang Zhenhua?

Since Carrie Lam likes to describe herself as the mother of the Hong Kong people, how can she sleep at night after placing the people of Hong Kong in the dirty grip of such an obscene system?

Robust rule of law institutions take decades to build, as Hong Kong’s experience shows. Hong Kong’s experience under Beijing’s rule, however, also shows just how quickly these institutions can be destroyed.

(Kevin Carrico is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at Monash University)

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