Since the beginning of the new era, China has taken a well-conceived approach to law-making, striving to ensure that law is strictly enforced, justice is administered impartially, and the law is observed by all. China has also made sure that all of the country’s initiatives are on sound legal footing, while making new progress in advancing law-based governance on all fronts. In a recent interview with CSST, Teemu Ruskola, a professor of Chinese law and society from the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, shed light on China’s new developments in advancing law-based governance on all fronts.

Impressive achievements

In March 2023, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC) presented a splendid report to the first session of the 14th NPC. In the past five years, the national legislature adopted an amendment to the Constitution, enacted 47 laws, revised 111 ones, and passed 53 decisions on legal questions and other major issues. NPC deputies have fully engaged themselves in investigations and surveys throughout the legislative process. Their participation has not only helped enhance the quality and efficiency of legislation, but also demonstrated whole-process people’s democracy and provided solid legal guarantees for building China into a modern socialist country.

“The sheer extent of China’s legal system today is an astonishing achievement,” Ruskola said to CSST. No state has ever produced as many organizational, procedural, and substantive laws as quickly as China has since 1978: its enormous judicial system comprises over 3,100 basic courts.

Ruskola pointed out two main reactions globally to the growing inequality resulting from economic reforms: a kind of rejection of the values of technocratic neoliberalism in the name of populism, and a quasi-Confucian emphasis on social harmony. China’s increasing legislative attention to social welfare and health care, for example, exemplifies both of these concerns, by responding to popular demand while seeking to diffuse social tensions.

“Yet perhaps the most notable occurrence in the development of rule of law in China has been the increasing rights-consciousness of its citizens, evidencing the spread of a new kind of political subjectivity in which political membership is defined in the language of law,” Ruskola said. “It goes without saying that Chinese citizenship remains distinct from its North-Atlantic counterpart. While the latter connotes a claim to individual rights against the state, the Chinese term for citizen draws attention to the ‘public-ness’ of a citizen, configuring political belonging as a collective membership in the polity.”

“However, whatever the differences between Chinese and Euro-American conceptions of politics may be, there is no question that Chinese citizens are highly conscious of their rights as citizens, translating their disputes increasingly into the language of law,” Ruskola said.

Whole-process people’s democracy

Ruskola observed that the revision to the Legislation Law [of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)] has embodied whole-process people’s democracy. “Historically, both liberalism and socialism are humanism: they assume the privileged status of humans, even as they have distinctive views of what human nature is and what humans should strive for,” he said.

Democracy that is limited to attending to the interests and needs of China’s current population is evidently not adequate to addressing questions of intergenerational justice, let alone the interests of non-human animals and the future of the planet as a whole. The success of whole-process democracy will depend on just how it is institutionalized. In the end, democracy is a practice, not an idea, Ruskola said.

He continued that the political vocabulary of our times is shrinking fast and growing increasingly binary. Today [Western] political scientists classify states into essentially two kinds: liberal and authoritarian. The term “liberal” implies a set of democratic institutions and rule of law, while authoritarianism signifies their absence. Yet neither democracy nor authoritarianism is a self-defining term.

“Whole-process democracy is an opportunity to help us advance beyond these binaries, and for China to develop new interpretations of their meaning,” Ruskola said. Democratic centralism is another alternative to liberal democracy, with the achievement of collective unity as the goal.

Ruskola noted that the PRC Constitution refers to “the people” in the third person plural, as a collective subject it summons into being, in contrast to the US Constitution which speaks in the first person plural, with the people seemingly merely legalizing their pre-constitutional existence.