China's Long March toward Rule of Law (review)

Professor Randall Peerenboom's China's Long March toward Rule of Law is an exhaustive compendium on the legal and political system of the People's Republic of China (PRC). It provides detailed discussions of the PRC legislative and judicial practices, the role of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the legal profession, administrative law, reform and the "rule of law," democracy, and human rights, with some context of history and prognostications on the possible future(s) of PRC law. Peerenboom downplays ideology in favor of focusing attention on particular issues and obstacles, institutions, and systems (p. 12). He notes the underlying conflicts between one-party rule and the rule of law (p. 24 n. 30), and he holds that the PRC has not yet attained even the honorific status of a rule-of-law nation (p. 140). Yet as the nation becomes further entwined in the international legal order, it is developing legal institutions (pp. 143-144). The footnotes and bibliography are extensive, with an adequate index. With the exception of a few notable stylistic quirks, the writing is fluent and easy to read. The book is like the PRC itself: big, diverse, sometimes unwieldy, balky, contradictory, maddening, and often a great ride. It could serve as one of the texts in courses on PRC law in both law schools and other venues.

The most lucid explanation is chapter 10, "Rule of Law and Economic Development." In this and chapter 11, Peerenboom notes the forces at work from the WTO toward legal reform (pp. 492-496). These chapters include citations relating to Taiwan (along with Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Malaysia, and Singapore) for some comparative analysis akin to Peerenboom's latest book, Asian Discourses of Rule of Law.¹ His lucidity here is no doubt owing to his four-year practice of law in Beijing. Economic development has been the area to which the CCP has given the greatest emphasis in the "reform and opening up" of Deng Xiaoping, and hence there is a richness in the concomitant law and legal practice that lends itself to this kind of study.

Chapter 6, on the legislative system, is a detailed examination of the struggle of the National People's Congress (NPC) to become a force in its own right, and to achieve consistency, quality, certainty, and concreteness across the broad array of new laws that have come into existence since the 1980s. This is a daunting task, as anyone who has worked at drafting legislation will admit.² Peerenboom details the creation and status of certain key laws—for example, the Law on Legislation ()—as well as the relationships between the NPC, the State Council, the provincial governments, and so on. This, combined with chapter 7, "The Judiciary: In Search of Independence, Authority, and Competence," provides a well-rounded picture of the sometimes troubled relationship between these sectors of the government. Chapter 7 is a central chapter because judicial review is the Rosetta Stone in virtually all modern discussions of the rule of law and democracy. Peerenboom reiterates some ideas he has published previously such the "path dependency" of legal institutions as a tool for predicting what may become of them in the future. He notes the continued subservience of the judiciary, particularly the Supreme People's Court (SPC), to the Party but tries to soften this by arguing that the "SPC is not asking lower courts to violate or set aside the law when deciding cases. Rather, lower courts are exhorted to make sure the cases are handled in accordance with law" (p. 304). He notes also that the CCP is actively involved, usually by its veto power, in judicial appointments and promotions (p. 305). He concludes: "To date, however, reforms have not altered structurally the institutional relationships between the judiciary and the Party or state organs" (p. 320).

All of this invokes and is set within the context...