CM: Xi Jinping certainly intends for law to play some role in managing Chinese society. But it is important to remember that the full slogan is actually yigui zhidang, yifa zhiguo (‘rule the Party according to internal regulations, rule the country according to law’). That is a vision of two separate systems—the first being the internal one applied to the Party itself, the other being the external one applied to the state and society.

Now, those slogans have been around for a while, and back in the late 1990s, there was somewhat more Party emphasis on the ‘law’ bit. Back then, it was possible to read internal Party documents and think that—just maybe—there was the potential for the ‘law’ bit to expand. That is precisely why all of those public interest lawyers and scholars had visions for the steadily expanding role of the constitution and its laws.

That has come to a grinding halt. First, Party leaders have clearly signalled that those visions are politically incorrect. Things like repoliticising the Chinese bar association, shutting down academic discussion of broader rule-of-law issues, or altering the constitution to expressly mention the leading role of the Party within the text itself (and not just the preface)—all of those are big red flags to everyone within the law community that, just as with other areas, Party leadership is supreme. But there is a second, and deeper dynamic at work as well. It is not just that there are simply limits to how far rule-of-law norms will be permitted to go. Rather, the Party norms are actually beginning to cannibalise the legal ones. For example, take a look at the new National Supervisory Commission or the 2018 government reorganisation plan. What you see there is that previous legal norms and institutions (like the functions of the state procuracy) are being absorbed—Borg-like—into Party ones (such as the Party disciplinary commissions).

And, of course, this is merely a reflection of a much broader trend in China today—the reassertion of Party political power across the board. You see precisely the same dynamic in corporate China with the reassertion of the role of Party cells in firms. Reform-era market forces, legal principles, civil society institutions—all of these things are being steadily marginalised in the face of the deepening pressure to strengthen Party power and uphold social stability.