Law and Politics in Modern China: Under the Law, the Law, and Abo ...

Unlike in Western democracy, where the loudest (collective) voice often carries the day, no major Chinese political shift has occurred that employs the use of words alone. The power to define the meaning of law and to administrate legal applications has become a prize to win through the uses of military action, conspiracy, and manipulation. In fact, most founding emperors had military backgrounds and were able to control an army, which was the only way to usurp an established dynasty. It required a strong leader with a highly organised army to win the war and to take and maintain the right to rule regardless of his social or ethnic background.

This tendency continued well into the modern era, although the contemporary Chinese leaders have changed political ideologies. Words and ideas alone never stood a chance in the political arena of modern China. Chinese politicians and social reformers had to learn to lead an army and fight their way to the top.¹⁰ Just like the founding emperors of the past, the emergence of both Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong were backed up by their military troops.¹¹ Mao defeated Chiang not because his Marxist ideology was more popular (as the Communist propaganda claimed) but because he was a superior military commander and political strategist. Although they embraced different ideologies, Mao and Chiang shared the same attitude towards law and employed the same methods to deal with lawmaking and legal administration. For both, law was simply an additional tool to aid them in achieving and justifying their political agendas. Each of them created a multileveled administrative hierarchy based on personal loyalty that they had cultivated in their early military careers. The various degrees of personal loyalty became the prime determining factor in the formation of the structure of their organisations and general power distribution within each of the Communist and Nationalist Parties during the middle of the twentieth century.

The Imperial Law

The Chinese imperial law was a well-developed and complex legal system with very detailed codes and procedures that engaged a hierarchy