ABSTRACT
Following the fall from power of Mao Zedong’s radical supporters in the late 1970s, the Chinese leadership embarked on a sustained programme of resurrecting and strengthening formal legal institutions. The Ministry of Justice, legal education, the people’s courts, the people’s procuracy, public notaries, the legal profession, codified law and other areas have all been revived during the past decade. These developments have been an important part of a sustained attempt to promote social stability, stimulate economic growth, control party power, regulate official conduct and so on. The post-Mao leadership has viewed law as an important mechanism for the elimination of many of the difficulties experienced during the turbulent period of the cultural revolution and the interregnum which followed (1966–76), and as a tool for combatting many traditional Chinese norms and values that are thought to be incompatible with the regime’s programme of socialist modernization. In 1979 the Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress emphasized that the ‘evils’ of both radical Maoist socialism and ‘feudal’ legacies
easily give rise to autocracy, bureaucracy, ‘special privilege’ mentality and a patriarchal style of work, as well as petit-bourgeois individualism, liberalism and anarchism. Now in some areas and units people’s enthusiasm and initiatives are still inhibited, while people’s right of the person, and their democratic and other rights are sometimes under no reliable guarantee. All this shows that, to fully realize a socialist democracy, it is imperative to gradually improve the socialist legal system, so that our…people will have a rule to go by in their actions, and the evil-doers will be restrained and punished for doing evil deeds. Therefore, the law enjoys popular support and all the Chinese people long for a sound legal system.
(Peng Zhen 1987:420)