ABSTRACT
The legal reforms undertaken by the Chinese government since 1978 reflect the interplay of foreign legal norms with a local context. At the very outset of the legal reform process, legal reformers were admonished to learn from China’s past and from the experience of foreign countries.1 In light of the limitations on the development of law and legal institutions during the early period of the PRC, the past was of limited assistance. As a result, the post-Mao law reforms placed heavy reliance on imported legal norms. Even where China’s legal reformers looked to prior PRC experience, this was strongly colored by foreign (mostly Soviet) ideals. Thus, the drafting of the 1978 Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure Law and the organizational laws for the People’s Courts and the People’s Procuracies relied primarily on prior drafts and enactments from the 1950s, which had been based largely on Soviet models.2 The 1981 Economic Contract Law was influenced significantly by prior contract regulations, which were derived largely from the Soviet and Eastern European experience.3 The General Principles of Civil Law (1986) were based on relatively well-developed drafts begun during the 1950s and continued during the post-Mao period, which themselves were derived from the European and Soviet experience.4 Civil Procedure Law too was drawn largely from European models.5
