A Looming Crisis for China’s Legal System
Talented judges and lawyers are leaving the profession, as ideology continues to trump the rule of law.
In China, politics continues to control law. The current leadership has rejected many of the universal legal values that China accepted — at least in principle — under communist rule in some earlier eras. Today, for example, to talk freely about constitutional reform, even within the sheltered confines of universities and academic journals, is not a safe enterprise. And discussion of judicial independence from the Communist Party at the central level is a forbidden subject.
Yet there is discreet, if passive, resistance. Legal professionals are not happy, but they dare not speak for fear of losing their jobs. Some are simply giving up. In Beijing, reportedly, many judges have recently resigned in order to find other work, as lawyers, in business, or in academia. This dissatisfaction could become a crisis for the Chinese legal system.
When discussing domestic legal reform in China, it’s useful to keep in mind the huge strides that the contemporary Chinese legal system has made since its calamitous beginnings. The first three decades of the People’s Republic of China, from 1949 to 1979, were a legal disaster. By 1957, the decision of ruling Communist Party leader Mao Zedong to import the Soviet legal model — a socialist version of a continental, Western European legal system — proved a failure. Three major periods of ideological turmoil — the Anti-Rightist Movement of 1957-58, the Great Leap Forward that immediately overtook it, and the Cultural Revolution that started in 1966 — demolished any attempt at a formal legal system, Soviet or otherwise. After Mao’s death in 1976, when party leader Deng Xiaoping decided to change the country’s political and economic course, China made another attempt at law reform, reviving the Soviet model. But Deng built upon it, adding Western legal elements and, to a considerable extent, opened China to universal legal values and practices.
Yet there is discreet, if passive, resistance. Legal professionals are not happy, but they dare not speak for fear of losing their jobs. Some are simply giving up. In Beijing, reportedly, many judges have recently resigned in order to find other work, as lawyers, in business, or in academia. This dissatisfaction could become a crisis for the Chinese legal system.
When discussing domestic legal reform in China, it’s useful to keep in mind the huge strides that the contemporary Chinese legal system has made since its calamitous beginnings. The first three decades of the People’s Republic of China, from 1949 to 1979, were a legal disaster. By 1957, the decision of ruling Communist Party leader Mao Zedong to import the Soviet legal model — a socialist version of a continental, Western European legal system — proved a failure. Three major periods of ideological turmoil — the Anti-Rightist Movement of 1957-58, the Great Leap Forward that immediately overtook it, and the Cultural Revolution that started in 1966 — demolished any attempt at a formal legal system, Soviet or otherwise. After Mao’s death in 1976, when party leader Deng Xiaoping decided to change the country’s political and economic course, China made another attempt at law reform, reviving the Soviet model. But Deng built upon it, adding Western legal elements and, to a considerable extent, opened China to universal legal values and practices.
