A legal system built on lies: Exiled Chinese lawyer calls China’s judiciary a ‘scam’

For more than three decades, Zhang Ren practised law in Beijing, navigating the labyrinth of China’s legal system with a conviction that justice could still be served within it.

But years of frustration, censorship, and persecution turned that belief into disillusionment. Now living in exile in New York, Zhang calls China’s legal system what he says it truly is: a “scam.”

In an interview with The Epoch Times’ Chinese-language edition, Zhang declared, “China needs democracy and rule of law. Under the current [political] system, the law is essentially a scam.”

His statement cuts to the heart of what he and other Chinese human rights lawyers have long understood — that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) treats the law not as an instrument of justice, but as a tool of control.

Zhang’s career spans the turbulent political evolution of modern China, from the immediate aftermath of the Cultural Revolution to the authoritarian tightening of the Xi Jinping era.

Having studied law in the late 1980s, he was part of China’s first post-Mao generation of formally trained legal professionals.

The Cultural Revolution had decimated China’s intellectual class, with millions persecuted, imprisoned, or killed under Mao Zedong’s violent ideological campaign. When universities reopened and legal studies resumed, young people like Zhang were tasked with rebuilding a legal system that had been erased.

But just as Zhang was preparing to graduate from Southwest University of Political Science and Law in Chongqing, another defining political event shattered his early idealism — the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Student-led calls for democracy were crushed under the weight of the People’s Liberation Army.

Zhang participated in protests in Chongqing and Hangzhou, an experience that permanently altered his view of the Chinese state.

Offered a job at the Zhejiang Provincial Procuratorate, Zhang turned it down. “My experience in 1989 made me realise I couldn’t work for a system that silenced its own people,” he said.

Instead, he chose to become an independent lawyer — a dangerous choice in a country where independence from the Party comes at a heavy cost.

Over the next three decades, Zhang handled cases spanning criminal, civil, administrative, and corporate law. But his career increasingly brought him face-to-face with the Party’s intolerance toward justice.

As he began to defend human rights cases, he found himself blacklisted, his income withheld, and his work sabotaged by authorities.

“In administrative lawsuits—such as disputes over forced demolitions—the procedures and rights guaranteed by law are fake,” Zhang explained. “The more people sue, the more injustice they suffer. Litigation becomes a test of [CCP] connections and money. Rule by men trumps the rule of law.”

He described China’s legal framework as a deceptive imitation of Western systems — replete with constitutions, codes, and procedures — but hollow at its core.

The constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech and assembly, is a “dead letter,” he said, since these rights are routinely nullified by the Party’s own regulations. “Not a single protest application ever gets approved,” Zhang noted.

The structure of China’s legal system leaves little room for genuine justice. The National People’s Congress Standing Committee — the CCP’s rubber-stamp legislative body — has ultimate authority to interpret laws and the constitution.

The Supreme People’s Court, meanwhile, lacks the power to rule on constitutional issues or check the Party’s abuses. No independent judiciary exists to hold the regime accountable.

Zhang’s criticism is not abstract; it is grounded in the experiences of millions of Chinese citizens who find themselves powerless before the state.

He pointed to the collapse of China’s peer-to-peer lending industry, which wiped out billions in civilian savings. Instead of protecting victims, Zhang said, the authorities confiscated assets and blocked lawsuits.

The Supreme People’s Court intervened to reinterpret laws, preventing civil claims while the state pursued selective criminal charges. “The CCP seized all assets,” Zhang said. “The victims were left with nothing.”

Zhang’s work eventually led him into one of the most politically forbidden areas in China — the defence of Falun Gong practitioners.

The spiritual discipline, rooted in meditation and moral principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, once enjoyed widespread popularity across China. But when its membership swelled into the tens of millions, the CCP saw it as a threat to its monopoly on ideology.

In July 1999, then-leader Jiang Zemin launched a sweeping campaign to “eradicate” Falun Gong.

From that point onward, Zhang became an enemy of the state. Even as Beijing’s justice bureau ordered lawyers to refuse Falun Gong cases, Zhang continued defending practitioners. His home was watched, his communications monitored, and his career crippled.

He recalls one practitioner, an elderly woman who helped care for his young son, as “kind and decent.” Her quiet moral influence, he said, was in stark contrast to the Party’s vicious propaganda.

Zhang rejected the state’s portrayal of Falun Gong, including the infamous Tiananmen “self-immolation” incident — widely debunked by experts as a staged hoax designed to turn the public against practitioners.

“There was no constitutional, legal, or factual basis for the persecution,” Zhang said. “The only reason was that Party leaders felt their authority was being challenged.”

He called the campaign against Falun Gong “the largest wrongful case in Chinese history,” pointing to the state’s forced organ harvesting as its most grotesque manifestation.

“The CCP has created the world’s greatest scandal—legalising [forced] organ transplants. This is utterly incompatible with human dignity and human rights.”

For Zhang, such abuses reveal the true purpose of China’s legal apparatus — to serve the Party’s power rather than the people’s rights. The CCP, he said, has never been a regime based on the rule of law.

“The law should be a social contract among different classes [in society],” he explained. “In China, it is nothing more than the will of the ruling elite.”

His experiences have shown that even in the most mundane disputes, such as construction companies suing local governments over unpaid bills, courts lack the power to enforce rulings against officials.

“Administrative litigation is about creating the illusion of legality,” Zhang said. “It’s performance, not justice.”

Ultimately, Zhang sees the CCP’s use of law as an extension of its ideology of violence and domination. “The CCP advocates violence—seizing power through violence and maintaining power through violence,” he said. “As a result, society can never be at peace.”

For the millions of Chinese citizens who still look to courts for justice, Zhang’s words are a bitter indictment. His message, stripped of any optimism, is that the system is not broken — it was designed this way.

A “scam,” as he calls it, built to entrap the very people it claims to protect. And for those who believe in the promise of law, Zhang’s life is a warning: under the CCP, justice is not blind — it is bound, gagged, and forced to serve power.