The Retrial of Duan Hua's Case: Don't Let the "Knife Handle" Shatter the Last Line of Defense of the Rule of Law

The Retrial of Duan Hua's Case: Don't Let the "Knife Handle" Shatter the Last Line of Defense of the Rule of Law

The retrial of lawyer Duan Hua's case has exposed the selective prosecution and forced conviction by the local political and legal system, as well as the blatant disregard for prior debts and case costs.

Judicial trials, once divorced from common sense and logic, become a "numbers game" behind closed doors.

Recently, the highly publicized case of Duan Hua, former director of the Guangxi Lawyers Association's Criminal Committee, who was charged with fraud, has taken a crucial turn. The Guilin City Intermediate People's Court has ruled to revoke the original verdict and remand the case for retrial. This ruling not only declares the original verdict, which sentenced Duan Hua to 11 years and 2 months in prison, completely invalid but also exposes two glaring "fatal flaws" in the original prosecution.

However, if we view the Duan Hua case as simply a "judicial miscarriage" or "business dispute," we are oversimplifying the issue. Behind this absurd accusation lies a massive, rusty, and brutal system

• the local political and legal system of the Communist Party of China, which is openly invading business autonomy with "criminal sticks," reducing the law to a tool for rent-seeking, performance sharing, and local protection.

Phenomenon 1: The 6.16 million debt that was ignored, and the "illegal possession" with a fighting purpose

In criminal proceedings, the establishment of fraud requires "subjective illegal possession" as a core premise. However, in this case, the prosecution has rarely, if ever, mentioned a fact as hard as iron:

The companies involved, which are shareholders of Guilin Liancheng Company, have accumulated debts of over 6.16 million yuan in legal consulting fees owed to Duan Hua over the years, none of which have been paid to date.

This is a crucial legal fact. The company, on the one hand, has been dragging its feet on paying Duan Hua's legal consulting fees of over 6 million yuan for many years and, on the other hand, has entrusted Duan Hua with a debt of 6.2 million yuan, which the company itself has written off as a bad debt, with "risk agency"

• that is, "the lawyer bears all the risks and costs, and the company takes 300,000 as a guarantee, and the rest goes to the lawyer."

From the perspective of common sense and commercial logic, Duan Hua originally had a huge prior legitimate debt to the company. Through risk agency and technical debt recovery, he obtained income to offset his previous losses, which is a reasonable commercial behavior. But why did this clear account become "fraud" in the eyes of the local political and legal system?

Systemic tumor: Selective prosecution under the high pressure of the Political and Legal Committee

This reveals the first deep-seated problem of the Communist Party's political and legal system: targeted bombing in the service of specific will.

Under the command of the local Political and Legal Committee's "unified coordination and joint prosecution," the prosecution logic of the public security, procuratorate, and court organs has never been objective and neutral in restoring facts. To piece together the crime of "illegal possession," the political and legal organs can cut out the cause and effect (6.16 million debt) from the timeline, leaving only the result of "the lawyer took over 5 million yuan."

This "puzzle prosecution" that extinguishes causality is essentially turning the state machine into a political tool for targeted encirclement and suppression of specific objects at specific times.

Phenomenon 2: The case cost that was not deducted, and the "indicator-based judiciary" under the big leap forward

Furthermore, even if we put aside the subjective determination and only look at the recognition of the amount of crime, the original trial was equally shocking.

The original trial directly recognized the 5.9 million yuan that Duan Hua obtained through risk agency as "fraud proceeds," while in the three-year execution, Duan Hua's personal expenses for travel, investigation, and judicial appraisal across four provinces were "cut to zero" in the account book.

Accounts cannot be muddled, but "indicator-based judiciary" does not care.

In any normal business or civil dispute, the calculation of final benefits must be deducted from the initial investment according to law. The original trial, without auditing, accounting, or deducting, directly "fully convicted," artificially inflating the amount involved.

Systemic tumor: Presumption of guilt on the production line of the public security, procuratorate, and court

Not auditing, not accounting, and not deducting seems to be the judges' lack of professionalism, but in fact, it is the inevitable product of the absurd KPI assessment of "case closure rate," "prosecution rate," and "conviction rate" within the political and legal system.

In the "production line operation" of the political and legal system, the public security's case filing, the procuratorate's prosecution, and the court's judgment are a highly coordinated and interdependent interest chain. Once a case enters the criminal procedure, if it is ultimately declared not guilty, it means that the political and legal system has "arrested the wrong person and prosecuted the wrong case," and the relevant handling personnel will face severe internal accountability.

Therefore, to preserve performance indicators and departmental face, the political and legal system would rather close its eyes and regard legitimate case costs as "crime costs," forcing the fulfillment of the top-level sentencing standard for "especially large amounts," completing this numerical big leap forward.

Deep interrogation: When the "knife handle" is aimed at lawyers, how many inches of the red line of commercial law are left?

The Duan Hua case has made the entire legal community feel chilled, not only because of the reversal of black and white in the case itself but also because it has exposed the systemic hostility and suppression of the political and legal system towards the "lawyer group."

For a long time, the lawyer group, which represents civil autonomy, contractual dignity, and resistance to public power, has been viewed as an "unstable factor" or "unruly element" in the extreme logic of the political and legal system.

In this case:

The boundary between civil and criminal cases is maliciously blurred: What originally belonged to the category of civil and commercial affairs, such as risk sharing and debt transfer, was arbitrarily labeled with the big hat of criminal "pocket crime."

Commercial credit is torn apart by public power: If a legitimate fulfillment behavior that bears risks and costs itself, simply because the "return on investment is too high," can be defined as a criminal offense by the state machine, then China's already struggling private economy and commercial credit system will completely lose their soil for survival.

This is equivalent to releasing an extremely dangerous signal to the whole society: in the face of power, all contracts are worthless; in the face of the "knife handle," no legitimate business model is safe.

Conclusion: Retrial is a mirror

The retrial of the Duan Hua case has torn open a corner of the local political and legal system's fig leaf. But whether this is an accidental flash of the internal correction mechanism of the system or a tactical compromise made under the pressure of public opinion and legal common sense remains to be seen.

The prior debt of 6.16 million yuan cannot be erased, and the huge case costs over the years must be audited in accordance with the facts. The retrial of the Gongcheng County Court is not only trying Duan Hua's innocence but also the last line of defense of the entire political and legal system under the banner of "governing the country by law."

If the retrial still runs blindly on the track of "power interfering with the judiciary," continuing to use the logic of dictatorship to rape the rules of commercial law, then this trial will completely become another tombstone of the Communist Party's judicial system's self-destruction. We will continue to pay attention to whose head this criminal stick will ultimately land on!