ABSTRACT
The introduction chapter departures from the comparative scholarship on the power of the highest courts among various jurisdictions, highlighting the research gap between well-established democracies and nondemocratic legal settings and especially the misreading of the highest courts’ power in the context of the latter. This chapter presents the book’s main questions, making inquiries into the power of the Supreme People’s Court of China (the SPC), which demonstrates unique value but has so far remained largely obscure, to see how the SPC has been organized and empowered in a nondemocratic legal setting when officially it is claimed that separation of powers does not exist. The main part of this book thus builds on a coherent analytical framework of input and output factors that together contribute to the power of the SPC, investigating into its recent development through a combination of theoretical and empirical research, and especially learning from its everyday operation and supreme court judges’ keen insights.
