Legal Reform in China: Institutions, Culture, and Selective Adaptation

Abstract

China's law reform program began in late 1978, at the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (Zhongguo gongchandang). The plenum reflected a tentative policy consensus about the need to reform the state-planned economy and build a legal system that would support economic growth and restore for the regime the monopoly on legitimate coercion that had been lost during the Cultural Revolution. Initial efforts included legislative drafting in areas of crime and public security, contracts, taxation, and foreign business. Law schools that had been closed since the late 1950s were reopened, and legal specialists who had been disgraced during the Cultural Revolution were invited to resume their academic and professional activities. While it is tempting to view the past 25 years as an uninterrupted process of policy consensus on legal and economic reform, in fact the post-Mao period was marked by contention and disagreement. The political crisis surrounding the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 raised the prospect that both legal and economic reform would be halted, although Deng Xiaoping's courageous Southern Tour (nanxun) in 1992 helped secure the momentum for stronger links between legal and economic reform (Wong and Zheng 2001). The subsequent acceleration