The Political Role of the People’s Court and Authoritarian Regime Resilience: The Revision of the Environmental Protection Law in China

Abstract

This paper demonstrates how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) designed the political role of the People’s Court for authoritarian regime resilience. In particular, the case of the revision of the Environmental Protection Law (EPL) is selected because it was the first law in China to give detailed rules for public-interest trials. To illustrate the process by which the law was made, the paper is divided into three parts: (1) the practice of local governments before the revision of the law, (2) central government inspections in the provinces during the period that the law was being made, and (3) the revision process of the EPL in the National People’s Congress. From this analysis, the paper concludes that the CCP streamlined the litigation process because it wanted to use the People’s Court system as a tool to collect and understand citizen complaints, which it could then use to manage the issues of social stability.