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contemporary China can be found only in its own cultural heritage and political establishment.
This book illustrates that China is not a pre-law developing country, as many scholars believe. The career of Chinese law has a much longer and more complex history. The fact that the Chinese words of law and political rhetoric have influenced and penetrated each other has made it impossible for Chinese law to function with the same efficiency as does the Western legal system. The political interference of legislation and legal administration derives less from the ideological choices of the Chinese leaders than from their cultural and linguistic environment.
With a legal tradition more than two thousand years old, China has been dealing with legal bureaucracy and corruption during the entire pre-modern, modern, and contemporary periods. Since China inherited a longstanding tradition of interweaving and fusion between law and state, law and politics, law and ideology, and law and business, Chinese law has failed to function as a detached mechanism through which social negotiation, mediation, and distribution are carried and regulated. A highly rhetorical language, law, with its words alone, cannot specify, define, and hold principles, regulations, and rulings without intervention of political interpretation and personal authority.
The impossibility of separating law from politics and officialdom is deeply rooted in China's nonabstract and personal language. As Chinese legal concepts and reasoning evolved within a complex literary and narrative framework, the Chinese concept of law has never attained the status of the English concept of common law as an abstract and externally imposed institution that enjoys the respect of its politicians and citizens. Chinese always see their law as human in origin, political in interpretation, and fluid in meaning. As an inherited attitude, the Chinese state and its individual citizens see legal regulation as a moving and shapeless encumbrance that must be pushed, bent, and even altered as circumstances allow. In the West, torts are determined by precedents, and new precedents are severely tested as they occur. This has acted as the primary motivator in the English based system and has reinforced its respectful status, which the general population as well as its legislators