Rule of Law with Chinese Characteristics: The Role of Campaigns in Lawmaking

Abstract

China increasingly relies on its legal system to regulate a broad spectrum of social and economic activity. There is, however, widespread failure to observe the law, which periodically leads to social crises and popular unrest. The Chinese state is not, of course, alone in experiencing this, but it responds to enforcement failures in distinctive ways. This article examines one such response. In this article, we explore the role played by the enforcement campaign in the development of the Chinese legal system. We focus on one campaign in particular: the campaign that was waged between 2004 and 2007 to redress the chronic failure to pay wages. Chinese enforcement campaigns are not simply directed at securing greater compliance with existing law. They are integrally linked to cycles of law reform in the PRC. Whilst their main impact is on enforcement, they also have an important role in influencing the drafting of legislation and the interpretation of law. This article documents the impact of this campaign on the production of law: in speeding up the iterative process of lawmaking, interpretation, and implementation, with production of important reforms to existing labour law in 2007 and 2008. It is the strong “planned” nature of the campaign and its emphasis on state leadership of lawmaking and enforcement that continues to shape the development of China's particular version of the “rule of law.”

State Regulation, Economic Reform and Worker Rights: The Contingent Effects of China’s Labour Contract Law

“…For discussion of the consequences of state socialist institutions on post-socialist working conditions, see Pickles and Smith (2010). 3 In dating China's Labour Law and Labour Contract Law legal scholars writing on the laws often use 1994 and 2007 respectively, the dates the laws were promulgated (see Biddulph et al 2012;Cooney et al 2007Cooney et al , 2013Qian et al 2013). Labour organisers and activists often prefer to use the years the laws were actually enacted, in both cases on January 1, the year following promulgation -1995 and 2008.…”

“Big Tigers, Big Data”: Learning Social Reactions to China's Anticorruption Campaign through Online Feedback

“…Resource constraints (Wedeman ) and bureaucratic fragmentation (Zhou ) are two major factors hindering effective routine “police patrols” of corruption (Wedeman , 96). During anticorruption campaigns, resources can be redeployed from other policy areas in the manner of interagency and intergovernmental bureaucratic “coordinated operations” ( tongyi xingdong ) to achieve a burst of hyperenforcement (Biddulph, Cooney, and Zhu , 376; Van Rooij ). In addition to regular anticorruption agencies, such as the CCP's disciplinary inspection committees (DICs) and procuratorates, other government organizations such as audit bureaus, police departments, and taxation bureaus are often mobilized to facilitate investigations.…”

Campaign‐Style Enforcement and Regulatory Compliance

“…As documented in the literature, various forms of enforcement campaigns have been staged in many countries to achieve pressing policy goals, such as road safety (Rundmo and Iversen ; Tay ), the war on drugs (MacCoun and Reuter ), anticorruption (Wedeman ), and counterterrorism (May, Workman, and Jones ). The existing literature has identified common characteristics shared by these enforcement campaigns, namely, a high degree of urgency, a temporary initiative, a tightly coordinated operation, and a clearly defined goal (Biddulph, Cooney, and Zhu ; Li and Foster ; Van Rooij ; Zhou ). Following the literature, we define campaign‐style enforcement as a type of policy implementation involving extraordinary mobilization of administrative resources under political sponsorship to achieve a specific policy target within a defined period of time.…”