Debating Constitutionalism in China: Dreaming of a liberal turn?

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Xi Jinping's first term as China's new president has been jam-packed with ambition and action. It began with his nationalistic call to pursue the Dream (zhongguomeng ...), a vision aimed at China's national rejuvenation but decidedly straying from the 2008 Beijing Olympics slogan, World, One Dream. Then came the campaign against corruption and graft in the upper echelons of the Party, during which a hand- ful of important officials were impeached, one of them the former Chongqing Party secretary, princeling rising star Bo Xilai. Following close afterward was a mass line rectification campaign that vowed to clean up the four unde- sirable work styles, featuring self-criticism meetings among Party cadres as well as a movement against liberal elements in the media and civil society.Meanwhile, a heated debate on constitutional government has also emerged. Fought by liberal reformists and party conservatives, the debate was staged under a partly wishful and partly strategic optimism that Xi might rekindle the long-interrupted political reform. On the one hand, liberal reformists drew inspiration from Xi's open-minded remarks in a speech de- livered on the 30thanniversary of the 1982 Constitution in December 2012. Xi said, No organisation or individual has the privilege to overstep the Con- stitution and the law, and any violation of the Constitution and the law must be investigated.(1)Liberals read Xi's comment as a sign of his deter- mination to undertake a liberal overhaul of the political system. Deliberately leveraging this optimism, they urged the Communist Party (CCP) to uphold constitutional government, ensure the rights enshrined in the Chinese Con- stitution, and set up checks and balances on the power of the Party-state.In response, a loose coalition of conservatives, including party ideologues and leftist intellectuals, responded by unleashing a spate of ferocious counterat- tacks in a number of key Party publications. Adopting an ideological stance, they argued that constitutional government is a by-product of Western capi- talism, incompatible with China's own practice of socialism, and that China's political system must reflect the country's social and cultural conditions. In this respect, China is incompatible with Western notions such as constitution- alism, representative democracy, the separation of powers, and judicial inde- pendence. They argued that the campaign for constitutional government was part of a malicious Western plot to subvert the CCP, just as Gorbachev's con- stitutional reform brought about the dissolution of the Soviet Union.This essay examines the arguments in the debate by situating it in the current status of the Constitution and its future role in China's political life. First, it looks at the state of the Chinese Constitution, its unfulfilled promises, and the obstacles to full implementation. Second, it reviews the current episode of constitutional debate and summarises the arguments both for and against implementing constitutionalism in China. It seeks to show that, despite the Party's tolerance of the on-going intellectual debate on consti- tutionalism, the recent crackdown against civil society suggests that Party leaders have made a conservative move against the actual practice of con- stitutional government, which diminishes hopes for genuine political reform.China's quest for constitutional governmentThe struggle for a constitutional state has been a perennial theme for more than a century in China. The earliest experiment could be traced to the con- stitutional reforms in the late Qing. At that time, moderate reformers fol- lowed the footsteps of Japan to establish a constitutional monarchy, but soon failed in the wake of a brewing revolution. Then in the Republican Era came various attempts to establish a constitutional state, but none of them were successful, given the frequent infighting between Republican warlords. …