Courts With Chinese Characteristics: Why Beijing’s Flourishing Legal System Still Has a Ways to Go
Just 40 years ago, as my family and I were completing a very pleasant and productive academic year in Japan, we had our first opportunity to visit China. We had been waiting to do so for more than a decade. For me, the highlight of the visit was a four-hour dinner conversation with Prime Minister Zhou Enlai. Never one to waste time, and always well-briefed on each of his guests, with a certain air of bemusement Zhou said to me, “I understand you have done many books about our legal system.” With his country still emerging from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, I thought that Zhou might be politely implying that I had made more of the Chinese legal system than China had.
As we both knew, the country’s formal legal system, which had been based on the Soviet model, was in tatters and had been for many years. The National People’s Congress, China’s highest state body, was not functioning. The Ministry of Justice and the Procuracy, which were responsible for prosecuting cases and supervising the government on legal matters, were defunct. The courts were in a state of collapse. The 1957-58 “anti-rightist” campaign had abolished the legal profession; the country’s few law schools and law journals had closed. Institutions for arbitrating foreign business disputes had atrophied and the People’s Republic was but a passive observer to the international organizations and agreements that ordinarily regulate nations’ relations.
Today, more than 30 years after reformist Party Leader Deng Xiaoping steered the nation onto its current course, the situation is very different. China now has a formal, functioning legal system. The People’s Congress, with various legal experts and agencies, has developed a vast quantity of rules, which cover most areas of public activity. China has also resurrected and strengthened its court system, restored the Procuracy and the Ministry of Justice, and has re-established the legal profession. It now has roughly 200,000 judges, almost as many prosecutors, and over 215,000 lawyers. Legal education has flourished; there are now almost 700 law schools and law departments, and several hundred thousand people take the bar examination each year. Law journals and books have proliferated.