“When a senior judge in south China decided to step down at the end of the National Day holiday this month, he took the rare step of posting a resignation letter online. “I don’t know when I started to feel less and less able to handle cases,” the judge, Liu Shibi, a 20-year court veteran, wrote on the social-media site Weibo. “So much time wasted on political study, the transmission of new attitudes, reflecting on important speeches, evaluating statistics and the rest,” he complained. “Why not waste it on other useless things: daydreaming in the spring sun, howling at the moon, getting drunk with friends in a field of flowers?” “Endless reform, endless pilot programs, endless bother,” Mr. Liu wrote. “The standardization, professionalization and specialization of judges all still out of reach.” ”
