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the poverty level and the privileged few who benefit from modernisation. There is a need for a general belief that progress is being made, or once again risk the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Therefore, China, in the eyes of the rest of the world, has to appear to be double-faced and simultaneously heading in opposite directions until it builds a new legal system based on the impersonal language of law and creates a real channel for public participation.
China developed a civilian stability after cultivating a state institution of long history. In theory, this stability worked the same way that the Western legal system does today. There was a separation between law and its administration, and between ideology and its implications. However, since the language of law has developed a wide spectrum of rhetoric alternatives, Chinese law could change more radically than did the English laws. Chinese law often fails to produce any compromising solutions in political disagreements and could only work before and after a change of political power and state.
Social and political change in China often operates within a spectrum that is much wider than its “legal” systems and beyond the terms that are specified in its law. Political change has had to involve the above law, under laws, and outlaws. In the time of anarchy, Chinese personal authority beyond the established legal boundary becomes the mouth of law and the hands behind legislation. The words of authority can change the meaning, connotation, and implication of the established rules or even overturn the entire legal system and moral establishment.
Until the middle of the 1960s, the political struggle within the Communist Party took the form of moral rectification and title shuffling, justified by constant ideological campaigns. After official ideology exhausted all its options and failed to motivate designated political action, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, a deliberate attempt to involve under laws and to create a majority to control the legislative authority and change the destinies of many of his administrators.
This has created a highly complex relationship between the authority of Mao and his bureaucracy, and between the interests of the military and civilian societies. It took Mao Zedong twenty years to realise that