Reliance on Formal Written Law, and Freedom and Social Control in the United States and the People's Republic of China

Abstract

The use of formal written law is highly developed in the United States (U.S.). Agents of the state publish innumerable substantive rules as to how people shall and shall not act, and procedural rules as to how agents of the state shall react to transgressions of the substantive rules. This rule-making, and the tradition that the rules generally can be expected to be followed both by citizens and by agents of the state, form the basis of an American strategy of social control. In the People's Republic of China (P.R.C.), agents of the state have promulgated few substantive rules, and it has been established that agents of the state are not found to follow the relatively few written rules as to how they are to respond to citizens' acts.l In the latter society today, it is rare to find someone 'punished according to law'. In the U.S., such punishment is frequently declared to have been given. Four hundred thousand Americans have been specially trained (as attorneys) to apply the written law to particular cases, while today in the P.R.C. there are no lawyers to speak of. In the U.S., the practical absence of utilized formal written law is generally seen as a fearsome prospect.2 On the one hand, the prospect is that of a breakdown of social order, of rampant social conflict, of anarchy. On the other hand, the prospect is that of totalitarian state restriction of citizens' actions, of unfettered social control. Obviously, the prospect is paradoxical. Conversely, reliance on a formal written law is seen to restrict both each citizen's freedom to act uncontrolled by the demands of others and others' freedom to control each citizen's freedom of action. This view is also paradoxical. Each notion implies that citizens' freedom from control by agents of the state co-varies directly with state agents' control of citizens' freedom of action. The paradoxes are eliminated only by making logically tenable the possi-