Party Regulations and State Laws in China: A Disappearing Boundary and Growing Tensions

Abstract In recent years, the intra-party regulations of the Chinese Communist Party have been rapidly expanding their reach towards state laws. The driving factor is the country’s distinct party system. Different from the ‘power-limiting model’ to which political parties belong in the constitutions of the United States and countries of Europe, China’s political party system belongs to an ‘empowerment model’—a model that has been strengthened over the past decade. Under the ideology of ‘the Party leads everything’, intra-party regulations are no longer limited to regulating Party organisations and Party members but instead extend to a wide range of matters of public administration. The boundary between intra-party regulations and state laws is becoming increasingly blurred, and a tension is forming with the values of popular sovereignty, checks and balances on power, and rights protection contained in the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China.