By Stanley Lubman

President Xi Jinping’s recent rhetoric on ruling the country according to law has cast a new shadow over legal reform in China.

Speaking of the courts and police in a meeting last month, Xi revived a vivid image from the Communist Party’s ideological vocabulary about the role of law, stating that the party must ensure “the handle of the knife is firmly in the hands of the party and the people.” Xi’s invocation of a menacing slogan ratcheted up the volume on a growing chorus of arguments that are being used to distance Chinese law from law in Western democracies.

Ominously, the metaphor is not new. It can be traced back to Mao Zedong, who coined it long before the People’s Republic of China was established. In the Maoist era the “knife” expression was used to refer to the police and courts as a weapon against enemies of the revolution, but, as Foreign Policy notes, “it fell into disuse after China implemented economic reformsin the late 1970s.” President Xi’s use of the image further underlines the Party’s aggressive hostility to judicial independence and separation of powers.

The Chinese Communist Party’s campaign against “political perils” and “Western ideas” has grown more intense, and threatens not only to impede the progress of law reform in attacking “constitutionalism,” but also to expose the emptiness of the crude slogans that currently proclaim Chinese ideology. In another step backward into China’s closed past, last month the Minister of Education warned against the “infiltration” of Western ideas, including the use of textbooks that “disseminate Western values.”