thanksgiving. on the next "washington journal" steve king of iowa talks about his attempts to stop the president's executive order on immigration. then we hear from congressman jim mcdermott of washington state on negotiation to fund the federal government amid the tensions over immigration. "washington journal" is live every morning on 7:00 a.m. eastern on c-span and you can join the conversation on facebook and twitter. the c-span cities tour takes book tv and american history tv on the road, traveling to u.s. cities to learn about their history and literary life. this weekend we partnered with time warner cable for a visit to waco, texas. >> as we began to receive the vinyl to be digitized to be saved, we began turning over the b sides of the 45s that we received. now, first off, gospel music was

not widely heard in the white communities. but the b or flip side would be heard even less. what we discovered quickly is how many of the b-side songs were directly related to the civil rights movement. since there's very few data bases and none of them are complete on all gospel music, didn't know that. we didn't know the sheer number of songs that had very overt songs like -- there ain't no segregation in heaven type songs, at a time when possessing one of those songs, much less singing it was a very dangerous thing in the deep south. you could get killed for a lot of things in the deep south, but singing that sort of song outloud, well, that's a risk. >> the texas ranger hall of fame, it was set up in 1976 for the 175th anniversary of the rangers. and honors at this point 30 rangers who made major contributions to the service or gave their lives under heroic circumstances. we have paintings or portraits

of all of those rangers. they really begin with steven f. austin. austin was very successful with his rangers. they fought not only managed to make the area reasonably safe for settlement from indian raids, but when the texas war for independence broke out, the rangers played a major role in texas gaining its independence by staving off the mexican army long enough to allow the kol lonists to build their own army and develop a strategy. and as a result, texas became its own independent nation, the republic of texas for ten years. >> watch all of our events from waco, saturday at 12:00 p.m. eastern on c-span2's book tv and sunday afternoon on american history tv on c-span3. next, a look at chinese corruption efforts as the chee niez party tried to strengthen

its constitution. speakers discuss how these changes might be implemented. the motivation behind the changes and what the effort means for u.s./china relations. from the wilson center, this is an hour and a half. well, good afternoon and welcome to the wilson center. all of you who are here with us here in this auditorium and those who are watching on c-span or on our web cast. the wilson center is the living memorial to the 28th president of the united states. my name is robert daly, i direct the kissinger institute on china and the united states here at the wilson center. we're very glad to bring you this program on corruption, constitutionalism and control, implications of the fourth china and u.s./china relations. this afternoon's talk brings together two topics which are very often treated separately although i think they belong in the same program which are

corruption and china's attempts to carry out further round of legal reforms. no doubt all of you have been following corruption stories from china over the past few years. and you have heard about x ping's willingness to take on both tigers and flies. probably followed the some times sorted tales -- ping's attempt to combat corruption is often in the american media characterized as a campaign but it really seems to be a state of affairs. it's part of xi's on going govern nans. combatting corruption has been one of the major factors leading to xi ping's great popularity in china. you need to look no further than the second line of the new viral song in china called -- i don't know if you've heard this or not. it's covered in today's new york times. if you haven't seen it, i rj you

to give it a close listen. the first two lines, china has produced a uncle xi. he dares to fight the tigers. so, notice too in this song -- it's actually very catchy. it has elements of march and elements of folk tune, it's hard to get out of your head. and that line -- china has produced an uncle xi harkens directly back to the east is red, which begins the east is red the sun has come up, china has produced -- so there's aling in this popular song about how ardently xi and his wife love each other. so, xi has been very closely associated with anti-corruption, the china dream, continued economic and social reform. this all seems to be of piece for his gof nans and indeed for

china. it's sometimes difficult for us from the united states to discern how these different pieces fit together. and therefore can be tough to figure out how we need to respond to a rapidly changing china. the difficulty levels at the linguistic level with some of the recent documents about legal reform in china and they're full of socialism with chinese characteristics and continued reform then different uses of phrases that seem to have something to do with law but it's clearly legal concept not quite like our own. even the phrase corrupt who is corrupt and who is not. one of the questions i hope we'll be asking today is whether the anti-corruption efforts of xi's government are primarily principled or primarily political. what does corruption mean? the documents that were released after the big meeting of the communist party in october, i think, offers some clues as to where xi intends to take these

themes, to take these efrforts o improve gof innocence. this was the first plenem. i was struck in reading american breakdowns of this plenum with the third plenum. many writers focussed on what wasn't in these documents. usuallily from an american point of view. they were criticized from the americans that wished would be in the documents that weren't there. we didn't focus on the many proposals for change that were in these documents. i think that we need to begin from a chinese point of view. the kissinger institute is committed to beginning an analysis of china with how china sees itself. we may not end there but that has to be part of our analysis. and the documents coming out of this plenum were very frank about the depth and breadth of problems that china faces in its legal system. it had almost confessional quality to it and seemed to raise expectations extremely

high. so to understand these values, the priorities, the policies of x jing ping, we want to start where china started with corruption and with legal questions. to do that, we could have no better pair of scholars than andrew wedeman and donald clarke. andrew is at georgia state university and is the united states now leading expert on chinese corruption questions within the context of political economy. he has been working on this since long before xi jing ping begans his anti-corruption efforts about 15 years. that's been a major huge focus? >> pushing 18. >> 18 years. before he came to georgia state, he was at the university of nebraska lincoln where he directed the asian studies program and the internationals studies program and also been a visiting research professor at beijing university. i had the pleasure of working with andy when he was a visiting professor of political science at the johns hopkins university

center for chinese and american studies where he was from 2006 to 2008. and i would also like to welcome his daughter, maggie, who is also at the hopkins center and is now studying china at george washington. andy is now working on a new book project that examined social unrest in china and he is the author previously from mow to market. and the double paradox of rapid growth and rising corruption in china brought out by the cornell university press in 2012. i should also mention that when we were at hopkins center together, andy once caught me singing loudly the rolling stone's wild horses and what i thought was the abandoned underground garage where the acoustics were excellent but i was not alone. and in that small community you did the courtesy of never telling anybody, so a man of discretion as well as a man of

letters. i want to thank you for that. donald clarke is the david weaver research professor of law at george washington university where he's been since 2005 and leading specialist in chinese law. he was previously at the university of washington school of law in seattle and at the school of or rental and african studies at the university of london. before that, he practiced law for three years at a major international if i recashtional large chinese practice and he is very fluent in mandarin chinese. he is on chinese criminal law and corporate governance. these are exactly the topics of the third and fourth plenum. he was also founded and maintains china law which is the leading list serve on chinese law on the internet and writes the chinese law prof blog which

i have bookmarked and is one of the first places i go when ever there's a major legal issue. he is a member of the new york bar and council on foreign relations. we'll start with 15 minutes each, first, andy and then don and then we may have a little time for them to ask each other questions and then we look forward to hearing from all of you. we'll open it up. thank you once again and andy, you have the floor. >> thank you very much, robert. i did not ever share your singing in the basement, but now that the cat is out of the bag, i no longer feel obligated to be discreet. welcome to all of you. and to the viewers of c-span. let me begin with the question that robert raised in his opening remarks. and it's one that i think we get -- i get frequently about xi jing pings now 2-year-old anti-corruption campaign, is it principled or is it political? i think if you look at the

way -- the most visible part of the campaign has unfolded, it's easy to say that this is nothing but pure power politics. the campaign really predates ping. it begins in november of 2011 when an english businessman turns up dead in a hotel is swiftly cremated and looks like he will be simply forgotten and then later in 2012 the former head of public security attempts to defect the united states in the wake of which we are -- we discovered that the wife of chung ching party secretary is allege willed behind the murder. they have apparently been collecting money from a variety of sources. the english businessman may well have been laundering the money for them. we move to former standing

committee member, former head of the internal security apparatus, from there we move on to a series of what i would think of as kind of clusters of corruption cases. we have the former head of the chinese national petroleum company. we get a whole nest of corruption cases in the oil sector. we then have a series of corruption scandals involving the former secretaries, people who worked with him, linked into whole networks of corrupt businessmen. we get evidence then that some of his former underlings in the ministry of public security have been involved in among other things, money laundering ma cow but also arranging dates for senior members of the leadership

with the staff of chinese central tv, finally we get his son is implicated in a series of schemes, most of which involve flipping of state assets, the son would get ahold of them on behalf of other businessmen and then resell them. among those that he was connected to was a man named leo han who is a major figure according to the government in chinese organized crime. if you look at that series and then -- excuse me. we get several more interesting scandals. we get what's known as the earthquake in which a whole host of people in the province, most of them in some way involved in the coal sector are implicated in a series of nefarious deals which in part link to a man namedling su whose brother

happened to be hao's right man and whose nephew plowed a 300,000 porsche to a bridge 4:00 a.m. in the morning with two scantily clad coeds. if you look at that and most recently of course we have the military scandal. a series of generals are caught trading basically promotions for jobs. most recently general hu was his house was searched. they found literally a ton, a metric ton of cash. it took between 10 and 15 military trucks to take all the, quote, evidence slash loot out of his apartment, out of his 20,000 square foot house. you look at these scandals and the easy conclusion is that this is about politics. ping comes in and basically what

you look at is for various random reasons, he sets himself up, he becomes an entry way, had been portrayed as something of a rival of xi jing ping. it's an opening that allows xi jing ping to go after him, go to go after a wide swath of people at a fairly senior level and to clear them out and obviously replace them with his own people. at the same time, you can look at it as a very clear effort by xi jing ping to consolidate his own power. by going after the big tiger, after the kongs, and showing that he is willing to take on anybody, regardless of how high up they might be, how sensitive the case may be. he is trying to demonstrate his -- when you look at it on that level, you do say, well, is

this principled or political? and i think the easy conclusion is to say, looking at that level it's political. but i think you have to broaden out and look at the bigger picture. the number of big tigers that is taken out is a little bit vague. exactly what institutes a big tiger in terms of rank, in terms of importance i think is partly in the eyes of beholder. so the numbers vary depending on who you listen to. between about five dozen and maybe 120, 130. whether it's 60 or whether it's 130, i don't think is actually as important as you -- as might appear on the surface. when you broaden out and look at the bigger picture, this campaign formerly began two years ago in november of 2012. the numbers are incomplete and unfortunately the chinese only give us numbers in year

incriminates not in months. so we don't know how many people got taken out during the first two months of 2012. we don't know how many people will be taken out this year because the year isn't over and you get part year statistics which having looked at these as i told robert 18 years, i know the part year statistics often are largely meaningless. that you really have to have the constant metric. so the best figures we have are for 2013. in 2013, the judicial branch which has the power to indict an individual and to bring that individual to court for trial, the judicial branch said they filed the case to hand down an indictment. they indicted 37, 551 people. so, if the number of big tigers

was 60 or 130, it's a tiny fraction of the total number of people indicted. that number, 37,551, was up almost 9% over the previous year. now, 9% may not sound like a tidal wave of anti-corruption, but if you go back and look at the number of people indicted, the number has gradually declined from over 40,000 down to a trough of 32,000 in 2011. it was up a little bit in 2012 but up 9% in 2013. the number may well be up something on the same order this year. it's hard to tell because you don't really have any partial statistics. they also give us some numbers for people higher up the food chain. for people who are holding leadership positions at the county and the departmental

level, they indicted 2,871, that was up 12% from 2012. more significantly at the prefek dhur and the bureau level the number jumped from 188 to 261, a 39% increase. so, when you look at -- when you look at the top and if you follow the campaign in the media, the media campaign or the media focus is totally on the big tigers. and the big tigers are important, but the bulk of the campaign is at the next level down. it's not so much against the flies, against the people who are the fairly low-level officials, et cetera. it's at this leadership, upper leadership level where you get this huge, almost 40% increase. to me, what that suggests is

that the answer to robert's question, is it principled or is it political is quite frankly yes. it's both. xi jing ping is trying to do two things at once. he is trying to consolidate his power. he is trying to go out and take out big tigers and at the same time he is as best i can interpret it, he is really serious about wanting to fight corruption. i think there's a realization and this comes out as i'll talk about in a minute when we look at what this campaign has revealed, corruption has gotten considerably worse over the past decade. when i wrote the book the working on it really in 2008, 2009, i looked at all the data and i couldn't see any real evidence of a worsening, deep deepening or intensification of corruption. when i look at this campaign, and i look at what has come out, corruption is worse than i actually had thought.

you know, you can look at people like general gut, a man in charge of logistics, base construction and other things for the pla. the man was apparently flipping real estate and collecting 2%. one deal allegedly involved 2 billions of yuan in fees for shanghai real estate. when they raided his house, he literally had a tunnel full of expensive mal tie liquor and a three foot tall golden statue of mao and considerable cash. when they raided another home, they found a metric ton of cash. these are unprecedented figures. and in some ways they're quite interesting. why would you sit on a metric ton of cash?

the answer is probably interesting. he didn't have anything to do with it. he couldn't get it out of the country. he apparently couldn't get it out of the country, and really couldn't spend it. he sits there and they accumulate this cash. so you look at the scale of the corruption that we're being -- that is being revealed in this campaign, and it is not millions of -- it is tens of millions and even hundreds of millions, which is -- these are sums that i think we have not really encountered in the past. but what also struck me is this, those two cases are real tigers. these are senior generals. but there was a -- there was a man named mao who was arrested in hubei province recently. the man ran a local water company. not what i would consider a high

powered position. when they raided his home, they found 80 million ren and b in cash. $425,000 u.s. plus, 37 kilos of gold and certificates for 68 properties. so not only do we have evidence of, you know, this kind of huge sums of money on the part of the tigers, but we have some extraordinarily fat flies down at the bottom. if a man whose basic job is to provide you with water and sewage can collect what you -- what i would have to quickly do my math and multiply by six and add, 100 million, if you can extract 100 for tap water, that's quite a fly in -- you know, we go on early on, we had all these cases, we had sister house, she had 45 properties, we

had brother house, 19 properties, and these are low level officials. so when you look at what the campaign revealed is it is not just a problem of big tigers gorging themselves on the economy, the flies are also sucking a great deal of blood out of the economy. what are the prospects looking at all of this? xi jinping racked up a pretty good hunting record. he's got some pretty impressive pelts, i think, as robert said. his campaign is popular. do i expect to see change in corruption? do i expect to have to be looking for a new topic after nearly two decades of slogging through endless stories on corruption? absolutely not. you know what, xi jinping at best is going to do is he's going to lay down some suppressing fire.

he's going to get people ducking. he's going to get people to be careful. they're going to take that 50 million that they have stashed in their basement and they're going to hide it really good. you know, all -- everything i've heard out of china recently people are petrified, they're worried, you know, there is a lot of fear and anxiety. how long that lasts, it is hard to tell. you know, this campaign is two years old. for two years i keep expecting it to begin to wind down. for two years i've been wrong one time after another. some had suggested this campaign is now the new normal. and that in fact this campaign will keep going on and on and on. if it does, that may be have positive effects because the pressure will be kept up, officials will have to be careful, and therefore they'll

avoid or they'll avoid accepting bribes or do it with a great deal of cunning. the other danger is after a while, when the inspectors don't arrive, and when you get away with it, you become emboldened. so i don't expect to see dramatic inroads into corruption. i don't expect it to go away anytime soon. but having said that, i think it is important to keep in mind, in the united states, if you go back and read american political history, in the 19th century in the era around the civil war, it in a shock some of my american comrades, but we had a problem with corruption. we had tammny hall. if you look at municipal history in the u.s., the political machine was the norm. whether in new york, omaha, nebraska, or chicago, et cetera. the u.s. seriously began

fighting corruption in about 1870. guess what? we're still fighting it. just a few months ago the governor of virginia, robert mcdowell -- mcdonald and his wife were convicted and will face prison time for corruption. if we turn around and say, gee, is xi jinping really serious in fighting it? and we then say, well, are we going to see victory in the war on corruption? i think not. the current war on corruption in china began in 1982. it has continued for over three decades at this point. i would expect it would continue for quite some time. it will ebb. it will flow. sometimes it will be more overtly political and sometimes it will be more principled. but i will give mr. xi credit that he has responded and i

believe he's actually made some progress, although i don't think you can make as much as most people would like. and i will end there and turn over to don. >> okay. thanks very much. good afternoon, everyone. thanks for coming out this afternoon. those of you maybe who were going away for thanksgiving tomorrow will regret having not gone away today. but i hope not. okay. so robert asked me to talk about the fourth plan of legal reforms and their implications for u.s./china relations. i'll start off with a broad brush picture of the fourth plan reforms and talk about their possible implications for u.s./china relations, but don't hold your breath because i don't think there are a lot of implications. the big picture summary of the fourth plenary reform decision is i think that it contemplates

no fundamental reform in the basic relationship between the legal system on the one hand and sort of the party/government on the other hand. so it seems pretty clear to me that institutionally speaking, the party is going to remain above the law. at the same time, though, i think the decision does contemplate some genuinely meaningful and in my opinion positive reforms, and so, you know, i don't think that it would be correct to look at the decision and say, oh, well, it is not advancing towards some ideal we have of the rule of law and it is meaningless. there is meaningful stuff going on there and much of it positive. so i guess first of all i just want to emphasize, though, that the decision still puts party first, law second. and it does this, really literally, every time the party and the law appear in the same sentence, the party always comes first.

so, for example, section one of the decision really starts off by saying several important principles that must be upheld in order to achieve the goal of ruling the state according to law and the first one is leadership of the party. so that is -- you'll notice doesn't have any kind of substantive content to it, it is an institutional goal, the party must be in charge. later on, the decision talks about what judges should be loyal to and lists four things, the party, the state, the people and the law. and, you know, you'll notice which comes first and which comes last. now, obviously grammatically speaking there is no particular reason why things at the front of the list get privileged over things at the end of the list in chinese or in english. but nevertheless, we all know that in a document like this, nothing, not even a comma, you know, is accidental, and so when we see the same pattern repeated over and over, i think we have to conclude that it is there for a reason.

some of you may have heard about the three supremes and i'm not referring to the music group. i'm referring to the shop, the three supreme things a document -- sorry, a slogan long associated with the former president of the supreme people people's court, and these have been -- we didn't hear about these for a while. and now they have been kind of resurrected in the fourth plan decision. and the three supremes are the three things that, again, courts should put at the forefront of their work and, again, the first priority is loyalty to the cause of the party. second, interests of the people. and the third, the constitution of the laws, and, again, party comes first, laws come last. so in general, what we are presented with is, you know, an admonition to officials to obey the law. so certainly officials are told they should obey the law. they're not told they're above the law. nothing like that.

but nevertheless, one, you know, gets the feeling that this is really kind of an internal goal of the party talking to itself. it is saying officials, you shouldn't have a mentality of special privileges, should not hold yourself above the law, you should obey the law, it is not proposing the constitutional changes that would take that choice away from officials. officials in a sense still have that choice about whether they want to obey the law or not. and again, one of the -- i guess key symptoms of that might be the system of double designation system, the informal system, i guess the extra legal, we can call it, system of detention, for officials being put under investigation, even though everybody in china basically -- the entire legal community, i won't say everybody, but most people who look at this

constitution in china would agree it has no basis in law and really legally speaking has to be considered unlawful detention or perhaps kidnapping. so now what about meaningful reforms? there are some meaningful major reforms. i think the main one which i think is really quite welcome is the system calls for some significant reforms in the system for managing judges. so there were some vague words about protecting official tenure. not clear what they amount to when it comes to what goes on in practice. much more concrete and meaningful is a proposal to establish what is essentially a kind of career civil service model for the judiciary. so junior judges would be selected by provincial level courts. and then would start their careers in basic level courts and so you'll have at the provincial level essentially a kind of judicial bureaucracy that will be looking at junior

judges, assessing them, monitoring them, trying to pick out promising ones, skillful ones and, you know, gradually promoting them up higher and higher. and the decision doesn't exactly say who will do the promoting, but i think it is pretty clear it is supposed to be in the hands of provincial courts. this is a very significant reform because the model does not exist at the moment. the way things work now is courts are still basically slowly working their way out of the kind of dunaway model, the work unit model. so the main or at least important way at present to become a senior judge at a high level court is start out as a junior judge at the same high level court. the same way that the classic story of business success and you start off at consolidated amalgamated in the mail room and then through hard work and gumption and, you know, appropriate scheming, you work your way up to the ceos office.

and so chinese courts kind of work on that model. you start off low. and you work your way up. and then, you know, the way to -- the way to become, again, a senior judge at a high level court is to start off as a junior judge at a high level court, how do you get there? go to a fancy law school and do well. if you start off at a low level court, you're probably going to stay there. there is not now a good system for identifying promising judges at lower levels and promoting them to different courts at higher levels, which, you know, isn't necessarily a disaster. in the united states, there is no systematic way of identifying promising judges at lower levels and promoting them to higher levels. countries like japan and germany have civil service judiciaries like that. at the same time, there say bit of a problem because the decision endorses another good thing, which is to say we should

have more system where by more senior and experienced people from outside the judiciary can move laterally into it. and they're looking at sort of the american model where you have kind of senior experienced lawyers, for example, who at the peak of their careers will then, you know, get a federal appointment and move sideways into the federal judiciary. so there is a lot to be said for this idea, but the problem is that it contradict the idea of having this career civil service model where you start off as a junior person in the very lowest court and work your way up, because the whole important of having experience dignified people is they're going to start off at a reluctantly high level, not going to want to start off at a low level court in the back woods somewhere making 5,000 a month. okay. so there is some contradiction there that needs to be worked out. the decision also calls for some significant reforms in the court system. and both of these are apparently designed to address the problem

of local protectionism. courts at a given administrative level tend to be answerable to political authority at the same level. because their personnel appointments are controlled at that level and funding is controlled at that level. they're not subject to any meaningful control from superior courts. and, again, that's different from, say, the system in japan, you know, where the supreme court, you know, operates not only as a court of final appeal, but also as a general administrative body. and so naturally because of this system of local authority courts tend to protect any party that local political authority wants to protect. for example, prominent local businesses. and, you know, the chinese legal community has for a long time, you know, thought of this as a big problem and proposed various ways of addressing it. one proposal that came out of the fourth decision is for the supreme court to establish what they call circuit tribunals with jurisdiction over several

provinces. so at the moment, the top court is the supreme court's court and below that are provincial level courts. there is a proposal to establish some courts that will cover several provinces. there is a misconception about this, though, which is that these are similar sort of to american circuit courts that is that they would be a level of court below the supreme court, and above the existing courts. that's not what is contemplated. they don't even use the word court. they use the word tribunal, which tells you that will be a branch of the supreme people's court and therefore any decision of those courts is going to be a decision of the supreme court and not of sort of a lower level court. then there is another slightly different proposal which is to actually to establish another layer of courts for a fifth layer that would cross jurisdictional boundaries and try cases that are across jurisdictionals. it is important to keep the two different reforms straight.

now, one thing that is very interesting about the communique is, again, and sorry to say, one of the things that it doesn't save, i won't talk only about that it does say this is interesting that it doesn't talk about, and that is a proposal that was muted at the third planum to centralize courts and financing to the provincial level, not beyond, but at least to the provincial level so that within any given province, it would be the provincial levels that decisions about personnel and finances were made. and this was very explicitly with the idea of reducing the problem of local protectionism. so, you know if it happened at the provincial level, it will not get rid of it. a lot of the local protectionism takes place at the local level, not the provincial level. there was this proposal for it to happen. there was some experimentation in shanghai about putting this into practice.

and not a peep about this proposal in the fourth planum decision. so it is hard to know why. the reform is very popular among academics but not so popular among judges. one reason is apparently that judges fear that a more kind of hierarchical system of authority in general will increase the power of the court leaders over them and maybe now they feel that their individual power is enhanced by being able to move sideways and they have some sideways connections and therefore they can kind of sometimes talk back to the leadership of the court. i'm not sure about that. the other thing which rings much more -- seems much more plausible is that judges in prosperous areas fear that putting court finances under a higher administrative authority would mean a kind of leveling out, so a unified salary scale for all judges within a given province is going to mean either raising the salaries of judges in poor areas or lowering the salaries of judges in rich areas

and they're afraid it is going to mean lowering the salaries of judges in rich areas. so, certainly odd that this reform seems to have stalled and that's odd and kind of unfortunate. finally, the decision denounces attempts by leading officials to interfere with court cases. this is a big prb and caoblem a for a system of keeping track of such attempts. i think this is a meaningful reform and ambition but not an implementation because they haven't changed the system of incentives for judge, so the same system that makes them responsive by officials to interfere is going to make them reluctant to report on these attempts to interfere, to record them in the big book, black book of interference attempts and pass them on. without a change in the system of incentives facing judges, it is hard to see how any traction will be achieved on this reform.

on the same decision, elsewhere, stress is the importance of the legal -- the political legal committee, you know, and that is a party body that exists at all levels of the party. and that supervises all the basically organ of the people's democratic dictatorship. the courts, police, procuresy and the justice bureaus, they regulate lawyers as well. so it calls for party organization in all political legal bodies, including courts, to report important local matters to the local party committee. so on the one hand, you're saying let's enhance party control over courts, let's enhance the control of the political legal committee over courts and on the other hand, you're saying, let's minimize interference by officials in the operations of courts. there is a kind of contradiction there and not clear how that's going to be resolved. certainly one would have to be incredibly naive to think that

the case was decided solely by the judges who confided at trial or that the case -- nobody in the standing committee at splpolitburo is touching that. someone has to doubt the sincerity of those moves. okay. there is a couple of minor reforms, but i think i'll skip over them for purposes of time here and talk a little bit about, you know, implications for u.s./china relations. and so the way to think about this is to think what are some of the irritants of u.s. ch.su. relations? intellectual property protection. the fourth planum reforms show an effort even if imperfectly realized to professionalize the courts and reduce the influence of local power holders in their operations. another thing that does not appear in the fourth planum

report is a lot of kind of populist language that appeared recently in discussions about the legal system. criticisms of judges for being too professional, for applying the law too mechanically, things like that. and, again, a little mysteriously that language is not in the fourth planum document. and so i think perhaps -- in some way, perhaps a repudiation of a recent turn to populism and maybe a return towards a valuing of professionalization in courts which is probably a good thing. i think this reduction in local protectionism and increased professionalization has to be good in general for intellectual property protection. since in many cases, you know, the violators are enterprises with influence at local level, but not necessarily at higher levels. you've got a particular factory

producing pirated eods, they're employing local people and paying taxes to the local officials and bribing the local officials. that's not going up to the provincial level, that's some small town level f you lose control over courts upwards, it is much more possible for people to move against those, against intellectual property violators. none of this is going to make a difference if ip enfringement rises to the level of a formal state policy in some areas. that's not all cases of ip infringement are of that kind. there have been some complaints about selective enforcement of anti-monopoly and other laws against u.s. and other foreign businesses recently. the u.s. chamber of commerce recently issued quite a detailed report on this, talking particularly about the acts of the national development and reform commission who seems to be the main target, so i had a

long summary here, but i don't have time obviously to go into it at this point. i guess i would just say that there is not much in the fourth planum decision that would address this problem because the problem of selective enforcement and perhaps enforcement isn't even really the right word since many times companies are being told don't call your lawyers. so they're not really interested in the legal analysis. it is more the southern share approach, how much do you got, son? so not much in the fourth planum addressing this problem. it isn't really about enforcement of law through administrative agencies, a lot of it is the measures they're talking about for legal system reforms center on the court system and not so much about kind of the everyday actions of administrative agencies in enforcing law. another area of irritation is extradition of officials with

corruption. you know who fled to the u.s.? and china says why would you want these people? why did you give them back to us. why does the u.s. want them. they don't. canada, the canadian government tried for a long time to get rid of -- get him back to canada. canadian courts stood in the way. so many times we have different branches of government. we have genuine separation of powers and so even the executive can't always do what it wants to do. the problem here, of course, is that china and the u.s. don't have an extradition treaty are unlikely to have ever have an extradition treaty and highly unlikely anyone will be extradited without a treaty. some problems are, you know, will the u.s. justice system feel that the defendant will be granted adequate due process in china. and in addition, you have the problem of the u.n. torture convention which bids members from extraditing anybody to a place where they believe the language is substantial grounds

for believing that there is a danger they will be tortured. this is a problem in the chinese legal system. official chinese sources have themselves characterized torture as widespread, deeply entrenched, stubborn illness and malignant tumor. all sorts of language like this. a recent report by the special reporter for the u.n. commission on human rights, who looked at this issue. there is some serious problems there. and it makes it very difficult to conduct -- to extradite people. nothing in the fourth planum reform agenda that addresses the problem of torture by police. and so i don't see any prospects for reduction intentions in that area. finally i would say, just to conclues with a look at human rights in general, again, i don't see much in the way of prospects for improvement in this area in the fourth planum decision. there may be things happening outside the fourth planum decision, but not in the fourth

planum decision. we have proposals to make the judiciary more professional. less subject to the influence of local power holders and those are all good things. but i don't think they really have much in the way of implications for the -- on the issue of human rights and the fourth planum decision still makes quite clear the primary loyalty of judges is to the party. so i'll stop there. and let's -- >> thank you. two questions, first, before we open it up to the -- if you have questions for each other, for the audience, having had these discussions with both american and chinese critics for about 30 years, many chinese friends and some american historians said that some of the things we criticize chinese officials for being corrupt about, our officials, our elites also gain, but they do it through ways that are now legalized, through mechanisms their children can go to top schools because they are

legacies. they have ways of propictutecti their wealth. part of the story of going from the age of boss tweed to the current day is elites finding illegal mechanisms for protecting theirs. and they can be accused of being corrupt. i was thinking of that critique in light of something that jeremy wrote recently. he said in the anti-corruption campaign, xi jinping has not yet gone after any -- either the second generation of the original red founders of china or the leading officials from the early stages of the people's republic. do we see in tandem with the anti-corruption campaign or in connection with the legal reforms, do you see any ways that the group of families of what xi jinping is a representative are actually protecting or legalizing any of

their -- is there any evidence of that going on. >> actually, i think when you look at china more generally, looking beyond the current corruption campaign, china faces a real challenge in that a generation ago there was no wealthy class in china. one of the byproducts of rapid economic development and the fact that the chinese economy is either as big or is bigger than the american economy is there is a whole new strata of wealthy chinese. many of whom are linked through blood or marriage to the political elite. now, for -- one -- the popular response is to assume that the prince lings all got there through nefarious ways of wire pulling and inside connections, et cetera. well, maybe i'm a cynic, but we

got a whole strata of those in the united states as well. no criticism of chelsea clinton there per se, but i'm pretty sure when she got a job at a hedge fund, it wasn't three weeks into the job that someone said your dad's who? we have a similar situation where the sons and daughter of elites is robert -- they have advantages getting into top schools. they're often bright and they often work hard. for us, this is normal. they go to wall street. they become investment bankers, et cetera. for china, this is all new. and i think the more general thing that china needs to be sorting out is not only the problem of corruption, but also the relationship between power and wealth. they're not separate. they're not separate in most economies. in china, the separation is more

imperfect and now i hope don has a good legal answer to the question that i've -- i'm trying to struggle with on the fly. >> no, i don't have a -- that's an excellent question and worth thinking about, is there some way that the second generation has figured out to entrench their privileges in a non -- in a not so obvious way. so i don't have a good answer for that. i want to sort of address an earlier point of yours, quite a -- it is a good point that, you know, i think if we look at any society, we will find somehow rich and powerful find ways to transmit their wealth and power to their off spring. and so i think if one looks at chinese corruption as a way of saying -- as a way of answering the question is china uniquely bad, then that's silly, right?

that shouldn't be the question. i think it is really it is -- the issue, you know, when i look at corruption, say, from a legal standpoint, is what is the government doing about it. what is the government allowing other people to do about it? so, for example, if you think about the corruption in the united states and tammny hall, so who was it that exposed tammny hall? was it a top down anti-corruption effort by the government. one has to ask whether those institutions, you know, are allowed to exist, such that chinese people could make their own informed decision about what kind of privileges do they think are okay and what kind of privileges do they not think are okay. >> i just add one other thought is paradoxically the people who have a real vested interest in creating legal protections for

property rights might well be the -- they don't want to be subject to arbitrary confiscation because their father or mother on the political side has gotten into trouble. if you look at pressure for property reform, it might well come from the top, the top down in a strange backward manner. >> second question. you mentioned human rights concerns, i was struck in listening to andy's presentation that in general it seems to me when americans hear about the cases of distance in china, human rights questions, we hear about what happens to any number of dissidents that get locked and we hear the legal or quasi legalistic claims of the officials they did this following thing. provoking sedition and people go into a nonlegal superior status. we say this is horrible, this is clearly false. why aren't they getting due

process. when the same legal order can say someone has a gold statue of -- several tons of ren and b, those people sort of disappear into some extra legal system. is there any kind of double standard at work or what is -- what criteria should we look for when we're judging the claims about evidence or guilt or innocence that come out of the chinese government in these various cases because we seem to look differently at claims about corruption and the kinds of claims that get leveled at dips dents and human rights cases. >> good question. i would like to point out before you said that, i had already blown the whistle on shang way as legalized kid -- unlawful detention under chinese law and extremely problematic. this is what is used against allegedly corrupt officials it is a huge problem because, of course, not everybody allegedly

corrupt is actually corrupt. and the people who run the internal party disciplinary system are not necessarily, you know, well trained in investigative techniques. they don't know how to, you know, trace, you know, trails of assets from clever people who have been hiding them and so you resort to the next best thing, which is, you know, the rubber hose. and so i think that accounts for a lot of the maltreatment that takes place within the system. but in terms of how to look at things, i think that it is -- sometimes we can have an idea about substance of the charges, whether they make sense or not. whether they really exist. do we, you know, is it fair to just -- for example, the current -- one of the current charges against the lawyer is, you know, stirring up trouble and provoking disturbances.

that's not as vague as it sounds because that's just the name of a crime, but you look at the criminal law, there is some conditions that have to be met and there is a supreme people's court document which makes it more precise. what conditions have to be met to commit this crime. in fact, the government can't just say you're just stirring up trouble. they have to say, you did a, b or c, and it is really impossible under the facts as we know them to find out that they did a, b or c, because it lifts very specific things that have to be met. very often we're not necessarily going to know those facts. i think at that point we can look at procedure. for example, has the government made the trial open? stirring up trouble and provoking disturbances, there is no state secret involved in that. the supreme court, people's court has been saying -- and chinese law has been saying since 1979, the court organization law says all trials should be open. but everybody knows you can't just walk into a chinese court,

right? even though trials are supposed to be open. if trials that don't have any plausible reason to be closed were -- are open, that's reassuring. if people are genuinely allowed to be represented by the lawyer of their choice, which, again, is allowed under chinese law, if witnesses are required to testify in court, which again is required under chinese law, even though in criminal cases it basically never happens. i think we could look at a way of kind of avoiding this issue of can we really know, right, to what extent are they guilty. we can look at this other question and say if there is a good case, why can't the government follow its own procedural rules and i think one could ask at least that much. and with respect to corrupt officials as well. i think people have disappeared and we haven't heard anything about him. i think he deserves a fair

process. >> i tend to agree with robert. there is a double standard being applied. when i read about a case in, you know, a case, my natural assumption of course they're guilty. in fact, we should not assume that. and certainly the way that the process works where you're basically detained by the party and you are detained until such time as they decide you are ready to move on. either ready to move on to your trial, or you're ready to remain in detention. and i know from reading some of the confessions you get the impression that six months, eight months a year into indefinite detention, people are willing to confess to anything in order to get their case moved out of the party disciplinary system and into the court system. one of the patterns you see is people get to court and want to repudiate their confession. they say i merely confessed in order to get to the court so i could deny my confession and, of

course, what does the court turn around do? no, you can't repudiate. it is true we tend to assume without too much question that people detained by the party are guilty. in fact, if you look at the numbers that isn't actually true, i gave you earlier the number of cases that were filed. there is an earlier stage in which the procuratorate accepts a case. they used to give us those numbers in the annual reports. they stopped doing them for whatever reason. but in the old days, about half of those who were initially investigated never ended up with an indictment. what i assume and what i've been told is a lot of those people end up getting an administrative punishment, a warning, demerit, demotion, et cetera, because it is determined they haven't really committed a major offense. what we don't know in the block

is how many of those people actually get off because of the procuratorate determines they actually aren't guilty of anything. it is a wide open guess. but i think you're absolutely right. when it hits the discipline inspection website and not so and so's under investigation for serious disciplinary violations by the g-way, my natural assumption is they're obviously guilty. but, you know, it is a reflex that i suppose we probably need to avoid. >> of course, the most important question the study of chinese law is when we will have a better word than procuratorate? >> procurasy. you cut with otwo syllables off of it.

>> thank you, professors. fascinating. i have two questions. one for professor wedeman and the naive one for professor clarke. i'll start with the naive one. i had to take the act for federal employees. i'm wondering if there is any kind of whistle-blower protection within the legal tim or any kind of parallel system and for professor wedeman, a short question, are there any corruption prosecution hot spots? you know, is hubei generating more numbers than other prove indianapol inces or is it pretty level? >> it does appear that the campaign is falling somewhat unevenly. the problem with trying to say

where it is falling most heavily is you got two choices, you can kind of do it as a kind of art, which is, you know, you read the individual cases and you start guessing, well, you know, my sense is it hits hard p. that's my impression of reading it. you really need to get the annual numbers from the -- that will come out with the work reports which will be filed in march. i haven't looked at the ones from 2013 at this point. but, yeah, it is uneven. exactly what explains the uneven pattern, i had not had a chance to really think about or to analyze. >> yes, sir.

>> hi. you taught about it is both political and -- so looking forward, do you think it is going to be more political or more principle? it seems to me if you want to sustain the campaign it has to be principled. thank you. if i can ask just robert just mention the chinese looking at sort of the k street, former officials, you know, lobbying for inference, that was like corruption after retirement. many chinese officials are corrupt before they retire obviously. thank you. >> timing issue. >> i agree with you. to sustain the anti-corruption drive over a -- over a long period of time, the principle has to take over from the political. at some point the political side can be dangerous. it can generate a backlash.

you can push things in directions that you might not want to go. the -- my own view is this, the principle part is the bulk of it. you look at the cases, they make up the most visible -- the most exciting part of the campaign. the really boring campaign is the day in and day out trench warfare, war of attrition against mid and low level corruption. that's been going on for a long time. xi jinping escalated that in 2012. i think it will continue to keep that up, but i would see at some point the political side would have to begin to fade somewhat. i think it will never go away. you'll continue to have scandals crop up, et cetera. but the principled part i think in the end is what carries you

on year in and year out as you slowly move toward a less corrupt system. >> right next. >> what do you think is the impact of all this corruption on the economy of the country or is it insignificant? >> it is not unmeasurable. the reality is when you look at the chinese economy, and you look at the growth of corruption, over the 30 years that the chinese have waged the war on corruption, china also had the second largest gain in per capita income in the world. it is almost -- it is well over double the number three which was south korea. it is multiple times what we had. so, you know, if you look at the

chinese economy, the pattern is worsening corruption and rising growth hence the subtitle of my more recent book. does that mean that growth has raised corruption -- that corruption has raised growth? absolutely not. it shaved something off. 100 million or 200 million sitting in someone's basement is not a profitable investment. how much is it shaved off i think is really hard to tell. but certainly it is -- there has been a cost and as the economy roared out at double digit rates, you could absorb that cost as the growth rate begins to fall, the drag of corruption necessarily increases. so you're at a point now where perhaps zemin or jintao could look at corruption and say it is a problem, but it is in the really killing us.

i think now more and more xi jinping has to worry about it. the economy drops -- growth rates drop below 7% and corruption will become a much bigger drag in relative turf. there has been an impact. >> tony and then to the back. >> i just wanted to push the conversation about political versus principled a little further. you haven't really defined what you mean by principle. and i'll just say i guess what i think and then you can comment on it, but it seems to me that kind of a more macro level you heard a lot about how the problem with corruption is that all the local officials to not really listen to what the party is trying to get them to do. so i see a campaign of against corruption as being the principle being re-establishing central power over local power. that seems to me to be a lot of the driving force behind it.

on the legal side, i know, legal scholars often don't like this discussion, but, again, you hear it a lot lately about his -- are these reforms about rule of law or rule by law? >> oh, there is no question that part -- a big part of the anti-corruption or big part of the corruption problem is the protective umbrellas, the ability of officials at the local level to collude, the inability of beijing to actually -- to work its will on the local level. that's a perennial fact of chinese political history. i think, you know, the anti-corruption campaign seeks to breakthrough that. but the anti-corruption campaign is continued to be structured along the very lines. you have not seen a centralization. you have not seen a move, although you have had these three or four nationwide inspection campaigns where the center literally sends people

out to bypass the local level, to go after -- to go after local corruption. but they have done this before. when they went after shanghai, when they went after the shaomin case, they had to send hundreds of investigators down from beijing because they -- beijing said you can't trust the locals, the locals will cover things up. if a sustained anti-corruption campaign means repeatedly having to send people out from beijing to literally attack the local level, that is going to be hard to sustain. you really got to get a systematic solution which gets rid of this problem where you were talking about earlier, where the local prosecutors answer to the local party officials. if the party officials are corrupt, what are you going to do, charge your boss with being

corrupt? it is career suicide. the other thing i think you need to be aware of is it is not like the procuratorate or the disciplined inspection commission is corruption free itself. and battling corruption within the anti-corruption institutions is a major challenge. >> could i ask a question. i want to -- i'm sort of springing this on you, don't know whether you had -- whether you've thought about this, but you probably have, which is that the -- i guess the consensus among economists is that china's growth model, which up until now has been sort of driven by investment in things like industry and infrastructure, you know, needs to change, to be more sustainable and change to something that is more service oriented and more demand driven. and so my question is, what is the relationship of corruption to the type of kind of growth model that china uses? does change the growth model -- will that make corruption, you

know, in the way it is carried out now more difficult and if so does that mean that we will have less corruption or does it mean we can expect major pushback against this reform for people who want to keep on dipping into the pot the same way they were able to do it up until now. >> if you look at where corruption is concentrated, it is concentrated in things like real estate development. it is concentrated in the energy sector with mining concessions, oil field contracts and so forth. it is concentrated, you know, my sense is that a lot of it is concentrated in the state sector because many areas of the state sector has either quasi nomo monopoly. if you marketize the economy and deconcentrate the pools of power areas where you can use political and administrative power to manipulate the result, yeah, that should do it.

and, you know, when i look at corruption in the book, my assumption was -- the argument was that a lot of the corruption that we saw in the 1990s, early 2000s was basically a fight over win fall profits and rents. the model suggests you should see the eventual disoperation of rents. when you got a piece of real estate, the first time it moves from the state to the market, there are tremendous win fall profits to be made, but once it is on the market, then market forces take over and the opportunities for excess profits should disappear. that hasn't happened. and the reason it hasn't happened is that the -- the shift from an investment kind of directed growth model hasn't been complete. is xi jinping going to push that? that's what he was talking about at the third planum. i don't know how much progress we made on that. i think you're also -- you're right, there will be pushback.

people do not willingly give away ill gotten gains. people will fight to keep them. so, yeah, i think, you know, if you did really see this new model, you would -- you should see, i should see, you should see reductions in corruption. >> i wonder if i could bring tony's question back to you. if it is going to be a principled -- not even a campaign, just a state of affairs, more principled and less political, you need an explicit theory of how things got this bad in the first place, where corruption comes from. the answer seems to be people are bad or is it a story about more virtuous, less corrupt central authorities having to rein in the locals or do you see in the fourth planum documents a real attempt to look at the system itself and to ask what it has been in the system what deficiencies allowed corruption, are we seeing the beginnings of a real systematic approach to corruption that can be sustained, that can be principled? >> i don't see that in the

fourth planum decision, no. i don't even recall them talking that much about corruption. there has recently been a proposal to have a sort of special unit set up this would be a governmental unit within the procure sy, not a party disciplinary unit and headed by someone with the rank, i guess, vice president of the procure sy, a high level official. and maybe some kind of attempt to construct something like, you know, hong kong's independent commission against corruption. but there is, you know, i don't see anything more than that. in other words, they're saying let's try to get a state body that will investigate corruption that has a relatively, you know, high level official in charge. and so therefore we'll be able to overcome some of the obsta e obstacles. that doesn't change the basic nature of the system. it says let's get a -- it is like i guess if you were to

worry about, you know, why poor people don't have enough food, you know you make them richer, rather than -- you make poor people not poor, rather than changing the basic sfrtructure society so you have free food distribution depots. it doesn't propose to change the system, just make some tweaks. i don't see any fundamental changes like that coming out of the fourth planum decision. >> looking at the way cases are presented, i think the thinking within the chinese system is it is bad people because the tendency is, first of all, you get a set of charges which are basically about corruption. then next you get the moral degenesee, the multiple mistresses, so on and so forth. what they're doing is saying

this person was just not taking advantage of their authority or the fact that the system gave them the ability to extract money either in the forms of bribes or embezzlement, rents, et cetera, but they were more -- they were fundamentally morally degenerate. when i read that narrative, the narrative that comes out of this is the system is good, the individual is bad. to me, that sounds a lot like denial. >> do you see this with dissidents as well. not just that they were stirring up trouble. they had mistresses or liked pornography, we see this in both cases. a question right in the middle of the back and then over to you at the side and then ryan. over to the side and then ryan. [ inaudible ] >> sorry. the cooperation between china and the u.s. on the fight against corruption, how long do we need to wait to see some real

progress on this aspect? thank you. >> i find the question a little vague, could you identify, for example, the barriers that you're awaiting to go away? >> just, you know, some officials from china, they travel to the u.s., how many -- how many years, i mean, maybe in the next year, can we see some flies and tigers from china be sent back to china? >> okay. so the problem with that is -- this is what i talked about earlier on, i don't think there is any immediate prospect of any progress on that because, again, that gets into, you know, extradition issues. there not an extradition treaty between the china and the u.s. and i don't think there is much of a prospect of there being an extradition treaty between china and the u.s. for that kind of thing, both have to have a fundamental faith in the country's legal system. i don't think that bilateral

faith exists. and so i don't think it is going to happen anytime soon. i think there has to be much greater degree of convergence between the two legal systems and don't see that happening soon. i mean, it is not because the u.s. likes corrupt officials. it is just some fundamental disconnect between the way the two legal systems work. again, i use the example of canada, the ca nadian government wanted to send back -- they were in canadian court arguing, get rid of this guy, we don't want this guy in our country. he got in and the canadian courts wouldn't make him level. they're perhaps bribing our own officials if they have other concerns. >> ryan and then over to this side. >> thanks very much. i actually have a question for

each of you gentleman. professor clark, constitutionalism popped up in the decision. this is after a couple years of constitutional from kind of being a dirty word on the chinese side and accusations and the idea of sticking to the western imported concepts. i'm curious for your thoughts on what inclusion of the term constitutional alongside of the law means in the context of what it means going forward. and that question i've got is, in all of the mentions of different locations where we've seen corruption cases, the one place i haven't much about is shawnhigh. there are rumors that shawnhigh will be next. i'm curious why we haven't seen activity in shawnhigh aep if there is any analysis there.

>> i guess i have to disagree. so they do talk about the constitution but and they have always talked about the constitution and the need for you know people everybody in the country to obey the constitution and also to act according to the constitution. but constitutionalism as translate need chinese, kim jung still remains a for bidden term. >> but you talk about the relationship between kim jung and -- >> it is a neeld, it doesn't -- but just those two words together. i deny that they have -- i could be wrong but my recollection and people -- if you do a word search, you will not find the term kim jung. >> of course you find the constitution but that particular meaning is not welcome, you

know, because it is understood by both promotor and detractor to mean things like, you know, accountable government. election is, et cetera, et cetera. >> they talk about the constitution, absolutely. but it is very important important they not accept the term constitutional. we can talk about the irony of a party, you know, that proclaims itself to be a markis party talking about how terrible western ideas are. but let's not talk about that irony. >> if we have short questions and short answers, we will have time. there a question four too. short questions, short ans and we will have time. >> is very hard to explain why something hasn't happened. there is a lot of speculation. i think a lot of that speculation comes out of those who believe that the ultimate

goal of the campaign is johnson and therefore johnson and power base in shanghai. i don't have an easy answer because i don't know if shanghai hasn't grown or if there is -- so i don't have a good answer for your question. >> quick questions and quick answers. [ inaudible ] >> -- out of right wipg and things to target out of the left wing. [ inaudible ] why he himself isn't a -- why he left rebel not right rebel. are there political reasons? >> you have to pick your fight

and take on those who are your more immediate enemies while building a united front with those who you might want to go after later. i'm not surprised about the left. i think that's the more immediate -- >> the issues that in the community, and one of the key terms come up in the communique as the rules law under the communist party leadership. so what -- i need some political science or legal interpretation of that phrase. what does that exactly entail. or how long a stand comparable to it -- it is similar to constitutional monarchy. so yeah. just phraseology. interpretation there.

>> okay, i think the rule under law of the party and the constitutional monarchy, under the constitutional monarchy, the monarch is under the constitution. so constitution modifies monarchy. where as in rule of law under the party, party modifies rule of law. you can look at it grammatically. so rule of law under the party. i don't want to make word plays or something. but what i mean to say is that as i think made clear and not just by words also by the actions of the party. it is not their intention to themselves, you know, the governed the sense by law. you know, i don't want to be unrealistic. there is no society which can be run mechanistically by the law, with no human intervention. obviously we have humans everywhere. i think there is a different

between, you know, political regime in which the government feels that somehow meaningful constrained by external rules and systems which it does not. and i think that, look for example, at the distinctions between, you know, when the need to have say a legal adviser in the white house who writes legal opinions coming up. justify the actions of the white house. and when the president wants do something, the president has to say, well, how will this fly? they believe they have to come up with some plausible legal argument. they can't just say oh, i'm going to do it. and i don't really think she even thinks that way. i don't think that in the standing committee of the bureau when they decide what to do with, you know, whether someone is saying, is that legal? we bet are talk with this law professor to get an opinion on it. nobody is discussing that's not part of the discourse that z

doesn't need to be defended. even if we say, sometimes say, you know, the legal opinions of people in the white house. we may think they are disingeneralous. nevertheless, it is easier as people acknowledge the legitimacy and i just don't see that going on at all and i don't see any ambition to have that go on. >> thank you. thanks to all of you for coming. . on december 4 we will have our second chinese/u.s. relations yearly review. then on december 12th, we will have the author of "who's afraid of the big bad dragon, why china has the best and worst education in world." well look at issues in the united states and chinese educational systems and wait we are increasingly influencing and learning from one another.

we hope you will join us for those programs as well. thank you and happy thanksgiving. >> hearings on tuesday to tell but on c-span 3 at 9:00 a.m. eastern, homeland security secretary jeh johnson talks about border security and president obama's recent executive order on immigration. and into the afternoon, the senate commerce committee holds a hearing to examine do mest uk violence policies in professional sports.

witnesses include representatives from the nfl, nba, national hockey league and major league baseball. that will be live at 2:30 eastern again here on c-span 3. members of congress return to capitol hill monday after a week-long thanksgiving recess. we spoke with a congressional reporter about some of the items that remain on the agenda with two weeks left before the current congressional session ends. >> immigration and taxes will dominate the final days of this lame duck session of this 113th congress. following us is billy house, his work is available job line. thanks for being with us. >> glad to be here, thank you. >> this om any bus measure, which is a washington term, exactly what does congress need do and when? >> december 11 is a deadline for

what has been a testimonimporar continuing spending bill since october. the technical start since the new year. so we've been relaying on the temporary spending bill again. that runs out on december 11th. so lawmakers are faced with where to go from there. >> there is talk of a short continuing resolution referred to as krom any bus strategy which keeps the government operating until mid february. the reason, obviously because republicans will have control of the house and senate next year? >> there is talk of that. so it is varying degreeses. the basic premise of that is that many of the republicans and some of the republicans in congress, realizing they will control both chambers starting on january 3rd. are wondering why democratic

majority leaders soon to be minority leader harry reid and other democrats would have such a say on a bill spending them until last so that notion is that let's do another temporary one and then the new republican dominated senate and house could come up with a spending bill after that. but republican leaders kind of want to wipe the slate clean and are preferring a measure that could be done now that could get congress through the whole entire next fiscal year without having to readdress it in the spring. but whether they could win over harder lined issues i'm uncertain. there a mixture of what they call a cr om any bus or krom any bus which would, in fact, continue spending through next october for most of the government agencies but not homeland security. and in that way, some members

will address in early spring some of the executive backs participated by president obama through defunding or other mechanisms. >> and that issue will likely come up tomorrow before the homeland secure the committee when jeh johnson testifies. what can we expect? >> i think you will see from that republican dominated committee because it is a house committee, focused on what exactly president obama -- what he might do to what sub mill might be a less secure order practicees. whether or not that's true or not, it would spill over also as to whether or not you give orders or plans by the president are just simply overreach. and how they might be combatted specifically through perhaps homeland security bill and spending bill and defunding mechanisms. >> how angry are congressional republicans over the president's action on immigration?

and how much of that is politics? how much is public pottering? >> i think there's legitimate anger pause of the latest in the series of executive actions. and even led them to sue the president. so it's another step in that direction that's already irritated them. specifically, it's angering a good number of more conservative republicans over the simple fact that lessening the deportation rules and conscripts in congress right now without congressional approval. it's kind of rubbing their faces in the fact that although they've dominated the november 4th elections, this president is kind of sidestepping, or trying to anyway. >> two other issues, first rand paul, a potential 2016 presidential candidate promising

to handle isil. this sort of bill, this large idea, in final days of the lame buck session, far fetched one, but raw makers still have to sign off at some point on a request from the pentagon. this will add to the dialogue on that and some of the back and forth. and whether or not rand paul legislation goes anywhere this lame duck again is unlikely that this will just add further fire to the debate over where exactly the pentagon training and equipment of syrian rebels and how much money should be involved and all that should be. >> finally where is the defense authorization act at this moment. will congress move ton before

the end of the year? >> the house passed the version of it earlier this year. and senate armed services committee is yet to bring its bill to the floor. but it will be addressed, i believe. before the end of the year. and i think there's no dispute about that. the question is, how quickly can they get it to the floor in the next two weeks. >> we look for you reporting on-line at nooational journal on-line. appreciate you being with us. >> i appreciate it. >> next, deborah rutter, outlines the centers future plan and talks about the importance of the education from the national press club this is an hour. >> good afternoon and welcome. my name i

my name is myron delkheim, the washington school of media and public affairs and former international bureau chief with the associated press and the 107th president of the national press club, the national press club is the world's leading -- committed to our profession's future through our programming, with events such as this, while fostering a free press worldwide. for more information about the national press club, please visit our website at press.org. on behalf of our members worldwide, i would like to welcome our speaker and those of you attending today's event. our head table includes guests of our speaker as well as working journalists who are club members, if you hear applause in our audience, note that members of the eppublic are attending. so it is not necessarily evidence of a lack of journalistic activity if you hear what applies.

i would also like to welcome our cspan and public radio audiences, after our guest speech concludes, we'll have a question and answer period and we'll ask as many questions as time permits. now it's time to introduce our head table guests. i would like each of you to stand as your name is announced. let me begin on the right. jean thai. elizabeth smith brownstein, a member of the press club's history and heritage committee and a writer of our online newsletters this week in the national press club history. doris margolis, president of editorial associates and a member of the speaker's committee. yasmine el sabowi. multimedia journalist and washington correspondent for the kuwait news agency. nick apostali ty deputy ceo of the visitor's center and pro

organizer of this lunchon. adrian arst, leading arts philanthropist who is a major funder of the adrian arst musical theater fund at the center and a guest of our speaker. jerry zerimski, buffalo news washington chief chairman of the speak are's committee and former president of the national press club. skipping over our speaker for a moment, amy henderson, historical emeritus at the national portrait gallery and co-organizer of this luncheon.

helen lee, henderson. important philanthropist who serves on the board of the kennedy center national orchestra, she too is a guest of our speaker. maria resio. ken melgren, chairman of the board of governors of the national press club, former chair of the broadcast committee and a retired staffer from the associated press broadcast division and michael phelps, former publisher of the washington examiner and news media executives. please, a round of applause. a year before his death, president john f. kennedy spoke on behalf of the national cultural center that would ultimately bear his name. quote, after the dust of centuries has passed, he said, we too will be remembered, not for victories or defeats in

battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit, unquote. this september deborah rutter became president of the john f. kennedy center for the performing arts. the first woman to serve in that office and the first to come from the world of orchestras. she grew up in a family that loved music, her father was a founder of the los angeles master correll. rutter began playing the violin as a child and she said that playing the violin is how i found out who i was. rutter comes to washington from chicago, where she was president of the chicago symphony orchestra association, she said she was drawn to the kennedy center for the opportunity to use arts to affect the rest of the world. she wants to develop greater collaborations with other arts associations, including museums, theaters and untraditional groups. she said the kennedy center

should have a seat at the table in dealing with challenging social and cultural issues. rutter is a prolific fund-raiser known for recruiting top talent. and boosting outreach to new audiences. here she will serve as artistic and administrative leader for dance, chamber music and jazz. she will also oversee the national symphony orchestra and the washington national opera. she will be inheriting an ambitious $100 million rep vags that renovation that is expected to be complete on john f. kennedy's 100 birthday.novat be complete on john f. kennedy's 100 birthday. please join me in welcoming the new president of the kennedy center, deborah rutter. >> thank you so much. >> thank you. >> thank you. i think he said it all.

so we're done now, we can all have a nice afternoon. thank you, myron for the invitation to be here, thank you, nick, thank you, amy, for the opportunity to be here and for your very generous words. you've done great research also. i understand. it is a pleasure and honor for me to be here, when you don't live in washington, d.c., this place, this place right here, not just washington, d.c., but this place is a very awe-inspiring place. it is really a great honor to be here. i am really grateful to my friends who are here from the kennedy center and who care about the arts and our society. i want to say thank you to adrian and to helen for being my stalwart, they're side by side. great friends and a support. i've been thinking a lot about storytelling recently. i'm not exactly sure why. but as i think about it, there's

some sign posts perhaps. this has been a year of major transition for me and my family. and as one says farewell to one home, a community and the friends there, it leaves you to reflect to some degree to commemorate your time there. last spring, i had many, many opportunities to share memories, tell stories and laugh about shared history. also in moving, you know the trauma of moving. you uncover all kinds of things. and we have come across countless boxes of memorabilia, some recent, some really ancient, all of which jogs one's memories of stories that are told and some untold. then of course, my daughter who has the same propensity to keep

things that her mother has, has child hood storybooks and they're plentiful, recalling for me the moments of joy and intimacy and wonder in the telling and retelling of those wonderful stories. so perhaps this is why i have a preoccupation with storytelling right now. arriving in washington has been an adventure for all of us, meeting new friends colleagues, such as here today, connecting with old friends, which has been really wonderful for me. learning the system of how the city works my daughter finding her new ways around her school and for me, a new place to work, and let me tell you, that is a real study, figuring out out to get around there. again, stories are plenty

as i introduce myself and hear about the history and the people of our new home. you might say, well, that's what washington, d.c. is all about. but i would say that this is what our world is all about. not just washington, but our world. it's about storytelling. storytelling is the way we share who we are with others. it is a way to reveal one's self, to communicate feelings and ideas. with our stories we share history, get to know one another. storytelling connects us and represents the draw strings of our lives. all of us are storytellers in one form or another. some of us are better or funnier than others, some more colorful and creative. others more liberal and concise, but we are allteling one story or another. just to make sure i was on the right track i went to the ultimate source and typed in definition of storytelling on my internet browser. the result, storytelling is the conveying of words and images often by improvisation or

embellishment. stories have been shared in every culture as a mean of education, entertainment, cultural preservation and instilling moral values. i didn't have to look far to find out exactly what i was looking for in terms of that definition. so with this definition, it argues that journalists are true professional storytellers. hopefully without too much embellishment or improvisation. journalists provide the heroic role of documents our collective lives, our shared history, you are the ones we engage with is collective lives, our shared history, you are the ones we engage witns ou collective lives, our shared history, you are the ones we engage witgs ou collective lives, our shared history, you are the ones we engage wit our collective lives, our shared history, you are the ones we engage with every day, or hopefully every day, every day in my case. your work provides the recorded history we reflect back on to understand who we are as a culture, what actions were taken, what decisions were made, what we have done as a result of those decisions, how we reached, how the larger world has

responded. so i put forth to you that art is just another form of storytelling. it provides the narrative to our lives. a way of advancing as well as preserving our culture. a story as conveyed through artistic express comes in varying forms. sometimes it's literal, sometimes it is obscure or initially beyond understanding. it can be fun and entertaining, engrossing and provokive. provocativ no matter the media or the actual story, it is always making one think and feel. theater, opera, dance, music, film and the visual arts, all of these are telling us stories. sure, often there is just pure entertainment to be enjoyed as well. who doesn't need that? maybe now more than ever. but an evening of so-called pure entertainment is also likely a

time when other eemotiomotions d ideas are bubbling inside. i recently saw "avita" with my daughter and her friend. but the truth, yes, great music, wonderful actors, telling a story, what is that story about? the struggle of lower class to break out of its cycle of poverty. overwhelming narcissism, greed, consuming power that bringing down the not just a woman and a family, but a whole country. yes avita is a story about history using the theater to convey, not just the details, but emotions, insights and values.

the performing arts highlight all of the emotions of our world. shine a spot light on topics we sometimes dare not to debate, stories that force us to feel feelings we want to brush aside. yet experienced individually in our heart and our mind. with "evita," we look back on an era of a country, it's history. in the case of tony cushner's "angels in america," we are faced with the reality of life experienced by another part of our society. that epic play changed the way we talk about gay life and aids. while it was perhaps shocking when it premiered in its format, dialogue and frank treatment of the issues, it was ultimately one of the first and most important expression on that topic, using the theater again as a way to explore social issues. so think about "swan lake,"

reflect on the rite of spring, consider balk's st. matthewclk's passion, which i love so much. all are stories to be told using the performing arts to communicate beauty, perspective, thoughtfulness, spirituality. they also challenge us as we sit in that darkened theater, to understand ourselves, consider our society and our environment. my argument, art is certainly for art's sake, i really agree with that statement and i support all who utter it. but i also fervently believe in the concept of art for life's sake, that we cannot live or share this world without art. art is the way we tell the stories of our lives, to offer commentary on the world we live in, to provide a sanctuary for personal, spiritual reflection, an opportunity to state more boldly those ideas that may feel too difficult, too dangerous for whatever reason, too personal or

socially challenging. or better yet, the eye and the exultation of life. the examples of bach or andrew lloyd weber may seem different from story telling. but i want to tell you now of quite a different example. when we announced in chicago that ricardo muti would become our tenth music director, he surprised us not for the first nor the last time, i should say, by announcing at his introductory press conference that he wanted to take the opera orchestra to all parts of chicago.orchestra to all parts chicago. especially those without access to music, even to prisons. he and i spoke often of his interest in sharing the music making of the orchestra, but prison was a bit of a surprise

to us. we took the challenge and developed a really special program. we chose to go to a juvenile detention center. to work with young women in partnership with story catchers theater. every week, every week, two members of our chorus go to the illinois state detention center in warrenville, working side by side with theater teaching artists developing stories and lyrics written by the girls, the inmates themselves. their stories. stories that are hard to tell, stories hard to hear. after four months of preparation like this, the cso composer and residence, also goes to the center for residency and works on developing songs for the girls, they write the tunes and she helps orchestrate it. these songs are then performed by members of the cso, who ultimately perform with the

girls their original musical theater peacpeaceipeacecpeacep.. the performances for the other girls in the center and all of their families. an incredibly powerful experience, telling the stories that are often untold, hidden, locked away. you can imagine the powerful emotions that fill the library of that detention center. i have experienced it a couple of times as a guest. some of those families have never heard their daughter or sister or niece or grand daughter communicate so directly. they didn't know that she had the power to share that story which is untold and therefore unknown. that hour of performance changed the lives of those girls, those families, for me, forever. that's what i mean by art for life's sake.

[ applause ] thank you. the follow-up activity that includes ricardo muti usually takes place before or after those four to six months. i must say i was rather skeptical about his participation before i went to warrenville with him. he requested a piano, and the two singers, the chorusters, which was raut really /* really good. they didn't know him but they knew the singers really well.ea. they didn't know him but they knew the singers really well. twice each year, he does this, he goes and spends about 90 minutes with about two dozen girls from the center. and you probably think this is just as crazy as i did, but in fact, performing opera areas, with the women that they knew so well was offering a mirror for these girls lives and an

inspiration. where else do you hear such stories? opera. somehow muti knew that and he knew exactly how to convey that to them, to have someone of that renowned care about two dozen girls in a detention center in a small town in illinois. imagine what that means and imagine how that is so affirming in their lives. art for life's sake. at the kennedy center, we overflow in the sharing and telling of stories. you probably know all of the programs and so many of you i have met here today have told me about how you attend programs at the kennedy center. but i suspect there are a number of programs that you don't know

about, because i didn't know about them much and i'm paying pretty close attention and until i got here, i didn't know about them. so in addition to the daily free millennium stage performances, the six productions of the washington national opera, the nearly 30 weeks of subscriptions and pop concerts of the national symphony orchestra, the extraordinary range of ballet offerings, cutting edge dance and theater programs, blockbuster musical theater offerings, we produce and present so much at the kennedy center, but we also have perhaps the most extensive local and national educational offerings in the country. i'm particularly interested in this for some personal reasons that my ron already told yoron about. but i'm still going to say them if it's okay. so standing before you is the product of primarily a public school education. in the third grade, my elementary schoolteacher opened

the classroom cabinet and said what instrument will you play? not, do you want to play, but what will you play? and i am here today because i had the opportunity to find myself through music. he got the story right, didn't he? that teacher and that public school gave me the first tools and the curiosity and the passion to find myself, to write my story here in the arts. i believe fervently that every child, every individual in this country deserves the find themselves, whether it is in academics, athletics or the arts. arts education has been diminished to such a degree, that generations now have lost the opportunity for even a basic education in the arts in their school day, arts organizations across the country are desperately working to

supplement program that do exist but there are just truly insufficient resources to ensure that all children have that experience in the classroom. the work we do through the kennedy center's education department supports teachers, students and families in their discovery of themselves through the arts and i'm enormously proud of these programs. as i said, i didn't know all of them before i came to the kennedy center and i'm still getting to know all of them because they're so multitudeness. but i would like to share just some of the ones that i do know about with you now. did you me that the kennedy center spends more than $1 million annually in its work with schools in the district of colu,