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.

Keywords:

• intra-party regulations
• ‘the Party leads everything’
• constitution
• Chinese governance
• empowerment model
• power-limiting model

Notes

1 Such as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

2 See also Corduwener (2020).

3 The version cited is the 2018 Revision.

4 Zhang Weiwei is a high-profile scholar in China who, for example, presented a lecture to the 19th Central Committee Politburo in 2021 for its 30th collective study session.

5 Translated by James Legge as ‘Let there be the men and the government will flourish; but without the men, their government decays and ceases’. See Legge (1891).

6 In Chinese, 党政军民学, 东西南北中, 党是领导一切的.

7 It merits noting that, unlike the heated debate during the drafting of the 1982 Constitution, this revision does not appear to have encountered open public opposition.

8 China does not implement the kind of official property disclosure system widely adopted by democratic countries, but all leading cadres above a certain level are required to report on personal property, marital changes, and children’s status to the Party organisation (rather than to the public).

9 Wang made this remark during the ‘Two Sessions’ in 2017 when participating in a deliberation session of the Beijing delegation (Wang, 2017).