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with the police when they interrogated him.He died in police custody twenty-four hours later. Professor Hé came out against the measure that led to this unnecessary death.”
    Hé arrives. He’s in his mid- to late fifties. He’s at once professorial, weathered and elegant. After preliminaries and several cigarettes, he begins to tell me about the Chinese constitution.
    â€œI’m devoted to the constitution, but my government isn’t. The fundamental political philosophy of the Communist Party is Marxism. Marx advocated no laws. As such, constitutionalism was never of much interest or relevance to the party. A constitution sets out to define a certain number of rights and rules. But regardless of the constitution, the party always presents all rights and rules as it sees fit at any given moment.”
    Hé then explains that, in practical terms, this means there is no legitimate avenue for social activism and no acceptable way to implement new models of society, whether democracy, freedom of speech, human rights or even trade unions.
    Hé has staked out an interesting stand for himself. He believes in rule-making and the law. It’s important, he thinks, to create laws that represent the best interests of present and future society and that society can follow without too much difficulty. The constitution thus has to both frame existing laws and enshrine a law-making process that gently leads society forward.
    Hé is strategically opposed to his government. He’s not arguing against the Chinese government’s laws. Quite the contrary: he is arguing that the government must respect the rules and laws that it gives itself, whatever they might be. He’s thus not making a moral argument against his government but a practical one in support of it. He’s arguing for consistency, not righteousness. In this sense, one can argue that Professor Hé is helping the government follow its own logic.
    Hé believes that law can transform society. China may no longer be commanded from the Forbidden City. But the model of government it represents continues. Power remains opaque and inaccessible. This must change. By forcing the empire to bow its head to the law, power will be returned to a place where it can be witnessed, participated in and transformed.
    The professor then takes me through the hukou system. He explains that at the beginning of the People’s Republic, in its first constitution of 1954, freedom of movement was guaranteed to the people. But that constitution was never properly implemented. And from the beginning, the People’s Republic of China was involved in managing and restraining the rural population. It needed that population for defence, and for food and industrial production.
    This increased after the failed industrial policies of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, when millions of peasants were forced out of the fields and into haphazard industrial production. Having abandoned their crops, the peasants began to starve. Many left the countryside and the famines worsened. The free flow of people had to be restricted.
    The later constitutions eventually reflected the need to restrain the movement of rural populations. Over the last thirty years, the trend has been moving the other way. The growth of the manufacturing sector in the cities requires a constant influx of labour from the countryside. The limits on free movement have been lifted to allow the cities to attract this workforce. But this workforce is highly volatile and has to be managed carefully. Not everybody can be allowed to settle in the cities. The movement of people is tolerated, but legal status is not easily granted. So the workforce remains transient and cheap.
    â€œThe best friends of the party are now capitalist entrepreneurs who profit from the cheap labour,” the professor explains. “This alliance makes for little interest in the bargaining power of the workers.”
    â€œBut this