Gonzaga Journal of International Law

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CRITICAL THOUGHTS ON LAW AND REFORM

IN POST-MAOIST CHINA

By:  Omar Swartz*

I. INTRODUCTION

There is a trend by some modern scholars regarding China, as well as cultural trends within the Chinese world, to view the various economic and legal reforms of the post-Maoist period in an uncritical light.  Specifically, there is a tendency to overlook or to deny the benefits and accomplishments of the Maoist period and promote reductionist and popularized beliefs about the Chinese Student Movement and the events in Beijing during June, 1989.[1]  Writers tend to use these events, and the romanticization of its leaders, as a talisman, dignifying their own research with an ethos of political and social importance.[2]  Writers also use these events to appeal to Western audiences who are already suspicious of the Chinese government.[3]

Undeniably, critics of the Chinese government are correct in asserting that the violent crackdown on the student movement was wrong - violence of that nature is inexcusable.  Tragically, it took the agitation and suppression of the children of the Communist Party to point out that State power, coupled with the unaccountability of those who are in a position to abuse this power, is unacceptable.  This power, which is so casually tolerated by the Chinese people when it is directed elsewhere, particularly against the Tibetans, the Vietnamese, and against individuals who are defined by the State as "enemies" (such as the Falungong[4]), becomes self-mutilation when it is met face-to-face by the Chinese themselves.  However, I argue that the critics of the Chinese government are less correct when they assert that the "Rule of Law"[5] would have prevented violence against the students.

II. THE FORCE OF IDEAS

After the Tiananmen debacle, it should be clear to everyone in China, and particularly clear to the Chinese leadership, that the government that rules most effectively is the one that does not rule by physical force, but instead by the force of its ideas (this point was supposed to situate socialism in its moral grounding).[6] China's own Tao Te Ching makes this perfectly clear.[7] While such "force of ideas" may include law and a legal sensibility, a morally just political regime is clearly not dependent upon having a legal sensibility (i.e. the presence of a legal sensibility is not the sole condition upon which a morally just political model rests).  The United States Constitution, for instance, was textually and practically committed to slavery for the first eighty years of its existence:

It forbade Congress to interfere with the slave trade for twenty years, limited its power to tax slaves, and required it to put down slave rebellions wherever they might occur.  It enjoined free states to respect the laws of slace states by returning runaways, and it denied slaves the right to sue in federal court.  It stipulated that slaces were to be counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of apportioning seats in Congress and the electoral college, thereby adding to slave owners' clout in both the House and the executive branch.[8]

This is a case of a political regime committed to a clearly immoral practice, and yet still grounded firmly in the Rule of Law. Neither are such immoral practices limited to our past.  Government brutality often co-exists, even within our well-defined and more modern legal systems (consider, for example, the U.S. suppression of the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement in the 1960s as well as the long term repression of organized labor).[9] Moreover, neither the rule of law nor a legal sensibility are necessary conditions for a morally just society to exist, as anarchist controlled Spain in the nineteen-thirties suggests.[10]  Political tolerance, inclusion, the grounding of a governmental practice of good deeds, and the encouragement of mass critical thinking and free expression are concepts that are compatible with, and indispensable to, most forms of socialist ideology.[11]

            The Chinese government, for all its claims to be Marxist, has much to learn from Marx's early writings.[12]  Notions of tolerance and socialist-humanist praxis (not necessarily legal sensibility) would have gone a long way in constraining the Chinese government from using the army to suppress unarmed protesting civilians.[13]

            Driving much of the rejection of Maoism is a perception that China needs economic reform.[14]  As Tingmei Fu notes, the "construction of the entire post-Mao legal system has been prompted by a fundamental need to serve the Chinese economic reforms."[15]  Although it is true that China has had a sluggish economy at times, particularly in comparison to Western notions of economic growth, one must keep in mind that the West engaged in an aggressive and exploitative foreign policy which helped to stimulate much of the West's economic growth.[16]  China does not have a foreign policy and hopefully never will.  Regardless of the need for China to "modernize" its economy, be suspicious of claims made about the beneficence of the "reform" movement in China.  Such claims (there and elsewhere) may often serve suspect goals and agendas.  What often is held up as "reform" turns out to be social regression, as can be seen throughout much of post-Soviet Europe.[17] 

Simply put, people need something more than survival money.  They need hope and the sense that, collectively, they can master the conditions of their lives.  Government is the most effective way they can achieve this goal, as each individual is too weak and is often distracted by self-serving goals.[18]  So it does not make sense for a society to work to create a weak government, which the Chinese are currently trying to do with the rule of law.  Making the government weak merely weakens the collective power of poor people, while increasing (under the guise of "economic freedom") the power of wealthy people to maximize their own advantage through government inaction.[19]

III. AGAINST CHINESE CULTURAL ELITISM

In a related fashion, there is a tendency by some scholars to be apologetic of what may be seen as Chinese cultural elitism (this is the phenomenon that exists among some Chinese of privilege, particularly the younger generation of college-educated scientists and scholars).  As these students experienced the benefits of Western ideology and culture, they sometimes lost a historical perspective on China's development; they became, in a sense, myopic, and failed to appreciate how their opportunities had been made possible by post-1949 gains in health care, education, national autonomy, and in the modernization of the Chinese cultural identity.  Unfortunately, the Chinese Communist Party itself may suffer from this problem, as it transforms itself from being a mass peasant-based organization into one dominated by the intellectual class: "[i]n the 15 since 1982...the proportion of college-educated members of the Communist Party's Central Committee has risen from 59 to 92%."[20]

While education is always a good thing, and while it is understandable that people with opportunity seek to utilize it in ways to maximize their potential self-fulfillment, China's intellectual leaders should not forget that the revolution of 1949 ensured China's survival at a time in which it was seriously imperiled, and that the communists initiated China's transformation into an emerging Superpower.  While it is easy to criticize the Chinese Communist Party for its many systematic problems, the more worthwhile venture is to assess the Party for its strengths (many of which often go overlooked).  The task of the Chinese and their allies is to build on those strengths in order to conduct even better political and social environments for all the Chinese people.  Of particular concern is how to protect the Chinese peasant and worker from the potentially devastating exploitation all too often inherent to the effects of capitalist government.

Two examples, one anecdotal and the other from the literature, illustrate the hostility of the modern culture elite to the Party and to the Chinese masses.  When I was in law school, one Chinese student told me during a conversation that he wanted to "save" China.  I was perplexed, and responded that the Japanese and the Kuomingtang have already been defeated and that Taiwan is not a military threat to the Mainland.  The student clarified that he meant to "save" China from the Communist Party.  This person felt that it was the duty of intellectuals, such as himself, to assume the "vanguard" in China's transformation away from socialism.

In the literature, a tangible example of the disregard for the beneficiaries of the Chinese revolution can be seen through Stanley B. Lubman, who assumes that law in China, and the judiciary in particular, needs to become more like the conception of law in the West (i.e., professional, objectified, independent, rights-based, etc.).[21]  He laments that judges have previously been recruited from the army, that they have not had a college education, and that they tended to reflect the outlook and the biases of the Party.[22]  In other words, the judges are not members of the new economic elite that has emerged in China as the result of reform.  Rather, the judges represent an "average" mentality; they come from the "people," and as such are not revered as the pride of China.

One of the phenomena we are witnessing in China today, reflected in Lubman and in many others, is a rejection of the value of the Chinese peasant and proletariat.  Sadly, as Lubman notes "serving the people is no longer a meaningful ideal."[23]  Instead, after Deng Xiaoping, "to get rich is glorious."[24]  While both statements are slogans, Mao's ideal (i.e., "to serve the people") is much more than the empty shell many people assume.  Mao's slogan is a more admirable cultural ideal than is Deng's, and it was one of the best ideas that Mao had to offer.  In this respect, Mao was unique as a national leader.  His slogan was a foundational synecdoche of Chinese cultural and spiritual rejuvenation following the desecration and castration of China during the century before 1949:  "The Chinese people are suffering" Mao correctly noted, and "it is our duty to save them and we must exert ourselves in struggle."[25]

The problem with rejecting the peasant and the proletariat, and privileging in their place the professional managerial class and the wealthy entrepreneur, is that the vast majority of the population in China becomes politically and culturally marginalized, which was the condition of China before the revolution.[26]  As a result of the revolution and the sacrifices spent in accomplishing it, the Chinese masses have earned the right to embody the dominant political persona of the nation.  The fact that a few people have managed to amass great wealth or to achieve a college education does not grant them the moral right to govern.  That right must be earned by the people who have worked the hardest, struggled under the harshest conditions, suffered the most, and whose character  defines the national consciousness.  Clearly, in China, this describes the peasant and the worker.

IV. The Need for a "Legal Sensibility"?

 Change, rather than stasis, is a healthy and natural part of any society.  But I question if the establishment of a "real" law in China is the most useful way to conceive of change.  There is nothing sanctified about Western notions of "law" that make it different from what has traditionally passed as "politics" in China.  Freedom comes not from law, but from the extra-legal efforts of people to challenge their society's notions of community through whatever means and to persuade the privileged to allow for an increased access to the social goods of that society.[27]  As society in China grows more unequal and more non-egalitarian in terms of wealth and access to the benefits of the new economy (as it did in the West, modified only by popular dissent), the law will likely codify and rigidify such inequality.[28]  Once again the Chinese peasant and proletariat will be subjected class in China, will be exploited by the West for her labor and resources.[29]  This is a pattern we see played out repeatedly in the developing world.[30]  For all of this to occur, under the watchful eye of the Chinese Communist Party, suggests that what China needs is a return to Maoism, not Westernization.

Rather than seeing the non-professional nature of Chinese law as a weakness, we should view it as a strength in a society with genuine revolutionary past.[31]  Most people in China do not have a college education, and many rightly perceive the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and the Communist Party as reflecting Chinese strength and independence (important normative values in China that ought not to be minimized, given China's history with the Western powers).[32] In short, even if the pre-reform system was in other respects rife with abuse as it clearly was, its egalitarian ideology spoke in practice as well as in theory to the interests of the Chinese masses.[33]

On the above point I diverge with some sinologists.  For example, note that Jonathan K. Ocko maintains that, "China remains a profoundly hierarchical society.[34]  While this may be true in that the "privileged are Party and government leaders," it is also true that, in comparison with the structural inequality in the Western world between the rulers and the common wage earner, the privilege is less extreme.[35]  This claim is grounded on Michael Parenti's argument, "in communist countries there was less economic inequality than under capitalism.  The perks enjoyed by party and government elites were modest by corporate CEO standards in the West, as were their personal incomes and life styles."[36]  More important to this argument is the fact that the economic reforms themselves are greatly responsible for accentuating the gap between the communist leadership and the Chinese masses; as Kenneth Liberthal notes, "[i]ronically, the reforms have encouraged [corruption]...[The reforms] have occasioned a drastic decline in any sense of ideological élan that might have restrained people from turning their political power to personal advantage."[37]

While I agree that there is more corruption now than before the reforms, I do not find that ironic.  Rather, I find that symptomatic of China's increasing dependency on Western values and norms.  Within the context of the non-Western world, these values and norms, so self-celebrated in the Western press as being evidence of a Western cultural supremacy, are far from benign, as the history of colonialism and imperialism suggests.[38]  The Western powers practiced an unconscionable slavery and brutal exploitation for five hundred years at the expense of countries like China.[39]  Thus, I am continually amazed by the rhetorical ingenuity of the mass media to turn Western values and norms into venerated objects of respect and admiration by people throughout the world.   People looking to the West for answers must not equate the unquestionable degree of wealth in the West with moral, spiritual, or cultural progress. Nor should reformers seek to replicated Western methods to achieve Western wealth, which is grounded in exploitation and military aggression.

One problematic Western value that is being adopted in China is "law."  This law is a complex notion, and thus distinctions regarding its character must be made.  One such useful distinction can be found in Ocko:

[E]ven if there is a re-centralization of the economy and issues of property and ownership rights are left unresolved, and even if no one sues the Public Security Bureau under the Administrative Litigation Law for an improper detention, courts will continue to apply the provisions of the General Principles and such special status as the Marriage and Inheritance Laws to a myriad of cases.  And it is as much out of these daily interactions with the law as out of response to extraordinary measures that a legal sensibility will grow in the People's Republic of China.[40]

This is a useful quote because it helps to put issues of law and society into perspective.  Although I will not go as far as Ocko in wishing that the Chinese gain a "legal sensibility," Ocko's quote does help us focus on one aspect of law that is valuable - the fluidity and the flexibility it gives us for arranging our personal lives.  To the extent that the General Principles does this at the micro-level, it enables people to imagine and to enact different types of social relationships.[41]  Law is a useful concept when it helps us to think about the ways we can reinvent ourselves and develop more meaningful and socially progressive interpersonal relationships.  To take two examples, "Questions Concerning Guardianship" from the General Principles, and the concept of the "Legal Person," we see that the law in these cases offers us abstractions and vocabularies, which have utility.[42]  It is difficult to imagine the possibilities of these legal principles, and other legal concepts, outside of literature, which helps us to articulate our needs and to define our culture.

VI. CONCLUSION

To acknowledge the functional aspect of law is not to grant law any special place in our society.  Many different types of texts help refine our social imagination.[43]  Thus, to talk in these terms is to refuse to place any political currency in the concept of "legal sensibility."  Rather, it is to reduce law to a sub-category of literature.[44]  This is where law as a concept properly belongs.  When we see law in this fashion, we become less missionary in our zeal to promote the rule of law as a political ideal.  Being lawyers, it is easy to exaggerate the importance of a structured law, but we should not do that.  Even today, for example, the long shadow of racial injustice still hangs over this country and remembering this should restrain us from panegyrics.

While we clearly need rules so that we can structure society, experiment with new and better self-description, and reduce personal and public cruelty, there is the danger of taking the idea of law too seriously.  As the legal positivist tradition in jurisprudence makes clear, there is no inherent connection between law and morality.[45]  When we take the idea of law too seriously, has failed to speedily resolve some of the most serious travesties in our own country.  Sometimes, it is true that society is often most sensitive to human dignity when people learn to resist the legal sensibility imposed upon them and learn to redirect our attention to other moral sources of imagination - as exemplified, for example, in the Civil Rights Movement.[46]  The bulk history of human progress lies here, represented in such figures as Spartacus, Sojourner Truth, Leon Trotsky, and Nelson Mandela.  In other words, progress often lies in the deconstruction of order, not in its reunification.

* Omar Swartz is an assistant professor in the University of Colorado at Denver's Department of Communication.  A.B. 1989 Humboldt State University (cum laude); M.A. 1992, University of California, Davis; Ph.D. 1995, Purdue University; J.D., 2001 Duke University (magna cum laude)

[1] Many of the essays collected in Civic Discourse, Civil Society, and Chinese Communities (Randy Kluver & John H. Powers, eds., Ablex Publishing Corporation 1999) speak to this point.

[2] See Timothy Brook, Quelling the People: The Military Suppression of the Beijing Democracy Movement, 2 (Oxford University Press, 1992).

[3] Id.

[4] A cult founded in 1992 by Li Hongzhi and rendered illegal on July 22, 1999 by the Chinese government, which considered it a political threat. The tenacity of Falungong members to resist government suppression lead to, in some cases, the harsh persecution of its members.

[5] The ideas grounding my evocation of the Rule of Law have been expressed clearly by Joseph Raz in The Authority of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).  According to Raz, the Rule of Law expresses the degree of commitment that a society has to an ordered legal system.  In its simplest expression, people should obey the law and allow themselves to be ruled by it.  In addition to adherence to the law by individuals, the Rule of Law requires that the government be ruled by law and be held accountable to it.  Because challenges to calcified ethics are usually seen as unethical by the groups whose ethics are being challenged, this seems to many people to be wrong, if not immoral.  Yet, I am arguing here that challenging such ethics is essential for social justice to emerge as an elevating force in any society, such as China, which has a pre-communist history of large property differentials between the few and the many.  This gross inequality contributed significantly to the catastrophic suffering experienced by the Chinese from the eighteenth through the mid-twentieth century.

[6] Erich Fromm, "Marx's Concept of Man," Marx's Concept of Man With a Translation from Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts by T.B. Bottomore, New York: Continuum, 1-83.

[7] Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching (Vintage Books, 1972).  Although Lao Tsu is the author of Tao Te Ching, it is fitting to attribute ownership of the text to China because of its exceptional importance and high profile as a cultural resource of China.

[8] Daniel Lazare, "America the Undemocratic," 232 New Left Review, 17 (Nov/Dec, 1998).

[9] Ward Churchill and Jim Van Der Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, (Boston: South End Press, 2002).  This is not to say that other Western nations have not practiced grave injustices within their established legal systems.  Both France and Great Britain, for instance have established legal systems and express commitments to the rule of law while also being brutal, militaristic, colonial powers that committed travesties which we could, in our modern language, call crimes against humanity. See Michael Beaud, A History of Capitalism: 1500-2000 (Monthly Review Press, 2001).

[10] George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1952).

[11] Erich Fromm, "Marx's Concept of Man," Marx's Concept of Man With a Translation from Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts by T.B. Bottomore, New York: Continuum, 1-83.

[12] Id.

[13] Marx had a revolutionary idea when he suggested that people could learn how to perfect themselves as people.  He did not like the fact that people were turned into objects to be used by others, as he thought that people had so much potential to thrive as autonomous beings.   Marx helped people to expect more out of life than to be objects to be used by others.  This was a revolutionary idea at the time because capital was busy perfecting ways to turn humans into machines (i.e., Taylorism).  For a while Marx's idea became popular, and some people (and some governments) made it a priority to help poor people achieve health and dignity.  An effort was made to ensure that people had food, a place to live, and health care.  In addition, people were given time away from work so that they could rest and develop meaningful relationships with their family.   Erich Fromm, "Marx's Concept of Man," in Marx's Concept of Man With A Translation From Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts by T.B. Bottomore.  New York: Continuum, 1-83.

[14] In Spring 2001, Professor Gao Xiqing, Executive Deputy Chair, China Securities Regulatory Commission, delivered a series of video-taped lectures at Duke University School of Law for students in Professor Jonathan Ocko's class in Modern Chinese law.  In these lectures, Gao noted that there are four people retired for every worker in China who has to support them.  This is an example of what neo-liberal theorists identify as a market "inefficiency."  This is an inefficiency that foreign capital, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) tries to "correct" by forcing governments to dismantle their social welfare systems.  In other words, if people cannot compete in the market on their own as individuals, it is considered "their problem," not the government's problem.  The government's job is to defend the markets against people, not defend the people against the markets.

[15] Tingmei Fu, Legal Person in China: Essence and Limits, 41 Am. J. Comp. L. 261, 264 (1993)

[16] Nineteenth-century Europe, a great period of capital accumulation, laid the foundation for much of the twentieth-century power and affluence of the West.  Yet driving this nineteenth-century wealth were two related conditions.  The first condition was the external condition of the British Empire (and of imperialism, in general), which enslaved large portions of the world.  The second condition was the internal condition of labor during industrialization, as described in novels by Charles Dickens.  In neither the Western colonies nor the Western nations themselves was any attention paid to "human rights," "freedom," or "dignity."  Along with massive capital accumulation in Europe was great human misery and de facto enslavement.  This misery was, I argue, qualitatively worse than the misery of people's lives under communism.

[17] Daniel Vaughn-Whitehead, ed., Paying the Price: The Wage Crisis in Central and Eastern Europe, (St. Martin's Press: 1997).

[18] This is a foundational assumption in most progressive social theory.  However, Government interference with markets, even to materially improve people's lives, often interfere with the so-called "leveling" tendencies of markets.  That is, markets have a tendency to knock down artificial barriers to achieve what economists call "optimal value."  Markets determine our worth as humans, or the worth of anything else, such as Spotted Owls, Sea Turtles, or a Van Gogh painting.  Market valuation often strips away everything about us that is human-i.e., the value of dignity, integrity, community, compassion, etc.  What we are left with is our "worth"-hair, teeth, plasma, vital organs, and labor.  In other words, markets objectify human beings and turn them into things to be used.

[19] Collectively, I would argue that society tells its workers that they can one day own their own factory or otherwise be rich and this is used to "justify" current social inequality.  We tell the Nike worker in Vietnam that "you can grow up to own your own Nike factory," and that "justifies" the current conditions in the factory.  While it is true that all of us have the potential to fight our way to the pinnacle of the hierarchy, there are, in reality, only a few spaces available at the top.  The game (or rule of law), alas, is often rigged from the beginning in favor of those with current privileges.

[20] Wrongs and Rights: A Human Rights Analysis of China's Revised Criminal Law, 24 (George Black, ed., Lawyers Committee for Human Rights 1998).

[21] Stanley B. Lubman, Bird in a Cage: Legal Reform in China After Mao (Stanford University Press, 1999).

[22] Id. at 253-254.

[23] Id. at 228, citing Charlotte Ikels, The Return of the God of Wealth (Stanford University Press, 1996).

[24] Orville Schell, To Get Rich is Glorious: China in the Eighties (1984).

[25] Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, at 178.  Regardless of how an individual may feel about Mao as a leader, his sentiment in this context is both admirable and profoundly moral.

[26] Rhoads Murphey, East Asia: A New History (Longman, 2003).

[27] See Peter Irons, A People's History of the Supreme Court (Penguin Books, 1999); Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (Harper Perennial, 1980); Howard Zinn, Disobedience and Democracy: Nine Fallacies of Law and Order (Random House, 1968).

[28] See Omar Swartz, "Toward a Critique of Normative Justice: Human Rights and the Rule of Law." 18 Socialism & Democracy 185-209 (2004).

[29] See Charles O. Hucker, China to 1850: A Short History (Stanford University Press, 1978), 152-153.  Of course, the exploitation of China was not solely a Western phenomenon.  Following the First World War, Imperial Japan began pushing out the Western powers and supplanting them with its own cruel colonization.  See Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking (Basic Books, 1997) p. 19-34.

[30] Jeremy Seabrook, "The Soul of Man Under Globalism", 43 Race and Class 4, 1 (April-June 2002).

[31] See Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China (Grove Press, 1968); Eric Wolfe, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (Harper Colophon Books, 1969).

[32] See Eric Wolfe, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (Harper Colophon Books, 1969) p. 101-155.

[33] See Leslie Evans, China After Mao (Monad Press, 1978).  Some Chinese will become rich as a result of market reforms.  This is good to the extent that it was unreasonable that all mainland Chinese were "poor" in 1967.  That condition of society was wrong.  The Chinese deserved better, after years of struggle to defend and to rebuild their country.  But if a few people become affluent at the expense of others being made poorer than before, and if a condition of this new prosperity is that the government deny most people even the barest of a "safety net" in terms of fundamental human needs, then I fail to see why we should celebrate the market.  If people do not come before profits, and if sacrificing people is the "cost" of profits, then Maoism, with all its faults, starts to look more attractive.

[34] Jonathan K. Ocko, Preface: Special Issue on the Emerging Framework of Chinese Civil Law, 52 Law & Contemporary Problems 2, 23 (1989).

[35] Id.

[36] Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism [emphasis in original] (1997) p. 49.

[37] Kenneth Lieberthal, Governing China: From Revolution Through Reform, (W.W. Norton & Co., 1995) p. 179.

[38] See Michael Beaud, A History of Capitalism: 1500-2000 (Monthly Review Press, 2001).

[39] Id.

[40] Supra note 36, at 2.

[41] See General Principles of Civil Law of the People's Republic of China, 34 Am. J. Comp. L. 715 (Whitmore Gray & Henry Ruiheng Zheng, trans., 1986).

[42] Tingmei Fu, Legal Person in China: Essence and Limits, 41 Am. J. Comp. L. 261, 264 (1993)

[43] See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press, 1989); Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Beacon Press, 1995); Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (The Johns Hopkins Press, 1987).

[44] James B. White, Heracles Bow: Essays and Rhetoric and Poetics of the Law (University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).

[45] H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford University Press, 1997).

[46] Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery (Harper Collins, 1958).  This is a paradigmatic text on this point.