16. JUSTICE

Since 1978, it has been fashionable, both inside China and around the world, to speak of the Maoist era as a period of near lawlessness, during which basic institutions of justice and adjudication essentially ceased to function in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), whether for purposes of criminal punishment or civil dispute resolution. In this telling, China had some form of traditional or capitalist legal system prior to 1949, and later recovered from the Maoist dark ages to reestablish a new rational developmentalist legal order that could underpin a new form of socialism with Chinese characteristics, and eventually help give rise to a socialist market economy, while preserving the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in power. The (re)construction of the legal system is thus central to the CCP’s ideological narrative of the reform era, even as critics abroad continue to decry China’s alleged rule of law shortcomings and pine for greater change (see Trevaskes’s essay in the present volume). Both the Party and its critics base their perspectives on an assumption that whatever legal order existed prior to the Revolution was destroyed or suspended, but not replaced, during the subsequent three decades. Both narratives make this explicit in claiming that no law functioned at all during the ‘long Cultural Revolution’ (1966–76). Unfortunately, such breathless teleological accounts misjudge and misconstrue the Maoist legal system that actually existed and functioned between 1949 and 1978.