ABSTRACT
There have been a number of ongoing debates about the overarching trajectory of China’s legal reforms. Some have argued that the country is approaching some thick or thin form of ‘rule of law’; while others have claimed it is stagnating or even regressing on important measures (Lubman 1999; Potter 1999; Keyuan 2006).1 Some have pointed to new benefi ts and protections for particular social groups or economic practices, while others have focused on rights and provisions that are still absent or that perhaps even have been eroded (Gallagher 1999; Seymour and Anderson 1999; Biddulph 2007). Some scholars have even looked to the legal system to provide new means for Chinese citizens to challenge abuses of state authority, especially at the local level (O’Brien and Li 2004) while others have emphasized the role of legal reform in bolstering the power of the state and Party centre (Bin Liang 2008). Few previous studies have looked at several areas of Chinese law in a disaggregated and comparative manner, however. Most have been either holistic analyses of the entire legal system or detailed case studies of particular sub-sections. In order to assess the interaction between legal institutions and the rest of the Chinese state, or more broadly between law and politics, to say nothing of the more complex dynamics of state-society relations, it is necessary to disaggregate the Chinese legal system more fi nely than has been the habit of Western scholars in the recent past. Specifi cally, I argue for disaggregation among several important areas of the law – family law, other areas of civil law, criminal law, and administrative law – to examine the relationships between law, politics, and society in China today. In such a framework, it is possible to distinguish between different dynamics of state-society relations driving the functioning of legal institutions as well as differing degrees to which legal processes and outcomes are infl uenced or constrained by extra-judicial political actors and institutions. After laying out a schematic framework for characterizing these relationships and processes, I move on to a more detailed case study of criminal law covering counter-revolutionary crimes as implemented by basic-level courts
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it pertains to counter-revolutionary crimes, is usually seen as a clear-cut case of the politicization of justice in Maoist China. My case study helps illustrate, however, that Maoist political campaigns and other extra-judicial forces exerted different infl uences on the functioning of urban and rural courts, underscoring the importance of sub-national comparative analysis of court work across space as well as over time, even within the same fairly narrow area of law.
