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of informal, so-called non-criminal sanctions which could be imposed by other bodies than the courts. In November 1979, the Standing Committee of the NPC adopted a resolution to revive the August 1957 "Decision of the State Council of the PRC Relating to Problems of Rehabilitation Through Labour," which permitted administrative agencies to confine a wide range of offenders including vagrants, hooligans, persons committing minor crimes, and counter-revolutionaries and antisocial reactionaries who have committed minor offenses to forced labour without trial for a period of up to four years.14 To administer this programme Rehabilitation Through Labour Committees have been established at the local level consisting now of representatives from local bureaus of public security, labour, and civil affairs.15 The reason for reviving this Decision was ostensibly to provide local people with a weapon to combat the rapid increase in crime (largely involving young people) which occurred after the Cultural Revolution, but numerous reports indicate that the programme is also being used to suppress 1) dissidents without their being able to claim any of the rights prescribed for an accused in the Criminal Code of Procedure and 2) young people who are unwilling to accept the mores and life style of the older generation.16
There are also frequent newspaper reports which indicate that cadres are continuing to behave in the old pattern irrespective of what the law may say, detaining people illegally, setting up clandestine tribunals, arbitrarily interrogating people and even tying them up and marching them around to be struggled against, extorting confessions by torture, illegally searching people's homes and humiliating them. Lawyers, in spite of their status as state workers, are frequently treated as traitors, no better than the offenders themselves, when they try to defend their clients. To what extent these practices prevail or go unpunished is difficult to tell, but police brutality and judicial arrogance do not die easily in any society, not to mention one which in the past has provided ideological justification for such behaviour.
Given the long history of China's disregard for civil rights and the persistence of Anti-rightist ideology as well as the practical problems involved in re-educating cadres and enforcing the
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