Shi Huangdi's Broken Justice System In China

During the rule of Qin Shi Huangdi during the Qin dynasty, China’s government was based upon the philosophies of legalism. Legalists believed that all people were created amoral, and morality could only come from harsh punishments in society. As punishments, hundreds of thousands of peasants were forced into slave labor. Due to the extreme conditions, many slave laborers died from malnutrition and exhaustion. Today, China is still one of the most frequent instigators of human rights violations, which can be described as the deprivation of the most basic rights that all people are entitled to on birth. Those who are deemed “enemies of the state” can have their families tortured by the government without recourse, and activists can often be attacked

Anybody who disagreed with the government or believed in another philosophy could be executed, (Blackwell). Today, China’s courts have a 99.9% conviction rate, with only 825 out of 1.16 million people found not guilty in the courts, (“China’s Broken Justice System”). With those rates, it is clear that there must be a large margin of those that are wrongfully convicted, sentenced for a crime that they did not commit. Indeed, inmates often tell stories of how the police beat prisoners with iron bars, batons, and hammers in order for them to make false confessions, (Reynolds). With this, the corruption of China’s modern legal system can be seen, as well as how they beat suspects in order to extort confessions, resulting in neither justice for the victims of crimes, but for also for those falsely sentenced. One could even argue that China’s current legal system is worse off than the one of Ancient China, as it is more likely that an innocent person is convicted than a guilty one in today’s courts, denying them basic human right of a fair trial. The faults in China’s legal system illustrate how it still operates under legalistic philosophies, believing that all suspects are guilty, as the police goes as far to beat confessions out of

In similar fashion to the past, the legal system of China is still deeply flawed, people are routinely abused by the government, and those with different belief systems and philosophies are still being oppressed by the government. By clinging to these ideals, which are shown to have failed, as the Qin dynasty fell in an extremely short time, China is not only condemning its citizens to a life in which they are afraid of the government, it is condemning itself to a repetition of history, to the eventual rebellion of those who are tired of being oppressed. In order to ensure the success of both China as a country and its people, the government must begin to serve the interests of the people, rather than the interests of political