“Here we know there’s a reason why someone’s pinged for corruption or someone’s not pinged for corruption and usually there’s something sits behind it, so when there’s an anti-corruption campaign in Guangdong or Shenzhen, then it’s a fair bet that that’s somehow tied to elite politics, because why ping Person A and not B? And I think that is the context in which law is practiced here,” [Geoff Raby, who from 2007 until this summer served as Australian ambassador to China] said. “There is rule by law here…But there’s no rule of law. There’s nothing that sits above the political processes of the [top leadership].”
…….“We have never seen in world history, with Nazi Germany perhaps to one side, a global economic power that has stood so far apart from the international norms of social and political organisation, so it’s something different. It really, really is different,” Mr Raby said. He later assured me that when he uses this line in speeches, he throws in a mention of Nazi Germany to pre-empt the nitpickers of history, not as a point of comparison to China. That would be rather undiplomatic indeed.
via An ex-ambassador in Beijing: Master of ping-ping diplomacy | The Economist.
