ABSTRACT
The legal system of the People’s Republic of China is the product of policy decisions by the Party/state to build an institutional framework to support economic growth. The decision to pursue legal reform, first articulated at the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee Congress in late 1978, was the result of a tentative consensus among the top leadership that paralleled a similarly tentative commitment to introducing market mechanisms to the state-planned economy.1 As a result, the legal reform effort has been marked by political and policy disagreements over broader issues of economic reform. Legal reform in China has also been complicated by issues of political reform and by ambivalence about the introduction of ideals of governance associated with the West. The linkage between economic and legal reform has become even more evident in the context of China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, where commitment to liberal legal institutions is presented as the price of admission to a market-oriented world trading system.
