132. Law, Policy, Moral Transposition, and Abortion in China

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There's a law in China that says a couple can have only one child. There's no law in China that says that a woman can't have an abortion. The law restricting family size forces a lot of abortions in China.

The writer of the number one leader in The Economist of 5 May, like many Americans wanting China to become a country observing "the rule of law," rather than a country subject to arbitrary imposition of the leaders' will, is indignant over the way the currently powerful men have put the blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng under house arrest for nineteen months, under no law we know of.  This, according to the writer, was done because, after "being praised for years by the local government for advocating the rights of disabled people" he "crossed the line by taking on the local party over the abortion and sterilisations it enforced as part of China's strict one-child policy."

Policy.  Different from a law.   See house arrest for a disagreement on policy and an enlightened Westerner is entitled to get indignant.  See house arrest for breaking a law?  Entitlement not so clear.

Since I believe that having no more than one child is a law in China, and that the leader-writer's word is inaccurate, I cannot share his indignation at the house arrest.  I may be indignant at the law itself, or the making of it, or the way the makers customarily operate, but, even though I go on to be indignant over the severity of the penalty, I can't be indignant over punishing a lawbreaker. 

The reason is that I believe in just what we're calling for in China, the "rule of law."  I know that that expression suggests something very large (from procedural guarantees to substantive rights) but however I expand it, I can't get away from what the word "law" (in the sense of "rule in a legal system") has to include: enforcement.  No penalty, no enforcement; no enforcement, no law.  You might as well call it advice, or a policy statement.

Am I entitled to be indignant over the one-child law itself?  I have to be careful here because I have objected too often to acts of moral transposition by my students to be caught committing one myself.  (Moral transposition: bringing someone distant in place or time into one's own place or time and judging him by standards there.)  So I let the Chinese leaders remain in China, look at the terrible over-population problem they were trying to solve there, try to imagine the trade-offs that could be made to solve it, and, unable to come up with a better solution myself, decide that I am not entitled to be indignant over the Chinese one-child law.

Entitlement to indignation over forceful action is usually gained only after answering three questions: Who am I?  Where am I?  What is my target?  Students of the 60s were not entitled to burn down ROTC buildings because their target was not the Army but the war, or those choosing it or running it.  The Army was needed, and they cheered for itwhen Arkansas police wouldn't let black students into schools in Alabama.  Vagueness, confusion, carelessness, those are the things that deprive us of entitlement.  Unspecific indignation, that's what we count on our newspapers to help us avoid.

From my newspaper, The Economist, I here need to know the specifics of the Chinese law and the facts of its breaking.  I don't need to know, not for my indignation, that Chen is "blind," that he "emerged from poverty," that he "fought for justice," that he's "a brave man," that he's "the best of modern China." That leaves me with no more entitlement than that of the students who burned down our ROTC building.