Constitutionalism in Communist China

Abstract

Communist China entered the “constitutional stage” of its experience on September 20, 1954, when the Constitution of the Chinese People's Republic (CPR), adopted by the first National People's Congress (NPC) on that date, was promulgated. The ordinary Chinese citizen could detect no immediate effect of this event upon the conditions of his daily life, and he had no reason to believe that things affecting him would be done very much differently in the future than in the recent past. He could understand from the incessant propaganda of the preceding months that the “transition to Socialism” was moving toward its climax. The new Constitution promised him no surcease from the incitements and pressures of the interminable “mass movements”—for “land reform,” “suppression of counter-revolutionaries,” “Resist America, Aid Korea,” “3-Anti,” “5-Anti,” “democratic reform,” “national elections,” “On to Taiwan,” and the others. Instead, he would be told that the past was merely the prologue: the pre-constitutional measures of September, 1949—the Common Program, the Organic Law of the Central People's Government (CPG), and the Organic Law of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC)—had only enabled the “people's democratic dictatorship” to lay the foundations for the superstructure of Socialism.