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Comment by eric-hu | Hacker News Reader

> - China will not become a democracy, or even make moves in that direction. However the rule of law will strengthen, and some civil liberties will increase.

The latter half of this one didn't come to be. Rule of law is weaker and civil liberties have declined.

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Civil liberty and rule of law are orthogonal mostly. China has used a decade to make most court cases publicly accessible through internet, all corporation and their holding/debt status similarly accessible, a host of other governmental information available. While there are still a significant amount of corruption, the law enforcement would have been at most transparent in history. Civil Liberty is on a different track however, with laws obstructing such being enforced.

And you actually believe the accuracy of those published documents?

Yes. Most of these are not related to politics at all, 99.9% of cases in China is the same as the west, traffic, violence, contract breach etc.

Most court cases yes, the ones that actually matter from a political and civil liberties perspective, no not at all. China is ruled by Xi Jinping and the Communist Party, not the law.

“China Must Never Adopt Constitutionalism, Separation of Powers, or Judicial Independence“ - Xi Jinping

According to the World Bank's metric, China's percentile ranking on rule of law improved somewhat from 2010 to 2018 (eyeballing the chart, looks like it moved from 40th to 48th). This is of course not quite the same thing as an absolute increase in rule of law; if rule of law is worsening everywhere, then the ranking change could still be a decrease (though globally worse rule of law isn't my impression).

https://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/Home/Reports

Rule of law seems to be mainly improved on economical related area, not outside of that.

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