Rule Of Law In China: Progress And Problems. Lin Li
the check and evaluation system of the administrative law enforcement filing, establishing and improving the qualification system for administrative law enforcement, and strengthening the clean-up and supervision of red-head documents. During the three decades since the reform and opening-up, especially in the past 5 years, administrative review and administrative litigation has developed very fast, and promoted the development of the disinterested and efficient government. Administrative review and litigation are important mechanisms to provide legal remedies and correct administrative mistakes for administrative behaviors in China. According to the requirements of the Outline, to build a government ruled by law, we must promote the reform of the administrative system, improve the quality of system construction, streamline the law enforcement system, and enhance the education of the rule of law among law enforcement officials. This is also the direction and path to be taken in the construction of a ruleof-law government in the future.
In the process of building a rule-of-law government, we will step up supervision over the abstract administrative actions such as the formulation of laws, regulations, and normative documents. On January 15, 2008, Wen Jiabao signed the Decree of the State Council, promulgated the Decision of the State Council on Repealing Part of Administrative Laws and Regulations, and conducted a comprehensive clean-up of 655 administrative regulations by the end of 2006. Altogether 49 administrative laws and regulations which were replaced by new laws or administrative regulations were abolished, and 43 administrative regulations were declared invalid because their working life ended or the adjustment objects disappeared. On the basis of strengthening the review of laws, rules, and regulations, the State Council further perfected the system for filing the regulatory and normative documents at levels of provincial, municipal, county, and township governments, and promoted law-based administration at all levels of local governments. From March 2003 to the end of 2007, the State Council conducted a review of 8,402 local laws and regulations, autonomous regulations, separate regulations, local government regulations, and department regulations of the State Council, and dealt with 323 rules and regulations in which problems exist. The State Council formulated the Regulations for the Implementation of the Administrative Review Law and actively explored the reform of the administrative review system and strengthened the capacity-building of administrative review staff at all levels. Since the implementation of the Administrative Review Law in 1999, over 80,000 administrative disputes have been resolved annually through administrative review across the country.
2.6.Constantly Improving the Judicial System
China attaches great importance to the reform and improvement of its judicial system. The 15th National Congress of the CPC put forward the reform task of “promoting judicial reform and ensuring that judicial organs are in a position to exercise adjudicative and procuratorial powers independently and impartially in a judicial system”. The 16th, 17th, and 18th National Congresses of the CPC all deployed reforms to continuously improve the judicial system.
Judicial system reform, as an important part of China’s political system reform, has undergone a process of gradual progress and deepening. In the 1990s, China implemented judicial reforms that focused on strengthening functions of court trials, expanding the number of public trials, strengthening lawyers’ defense, and building a team of professional judges and prosecutors. Starting from 2004, China launched across the country a large-scale judicial reform that was uniformly planned in deployment and organized in implementation. Starting from the problems that the public had expressed its strong concern about and the key links that could affect judicial justice, according to the requirements of impartially administrated justice and strict law enforcement, following the general law and characteristics of justice, China worked hard on improving the organization structure, division of powers, and management system of judicial organs, and on improving the judicial system in which powers and responsibilities were clearly specified, mutually coordinated, and restrained, and which was efficiently operated. In 2008, China started a new round of judicial reforms. The reforms, taking into account the people’s judicial need, took the maintenance of the common interests of the people as the foundation, the promotion of social harmony as the main line, and the strengthening of checks on and overseeing of power as the key points. They focused on the major issues affecting the judicial administration and reducing the judicial ability to solve the systemic, institutional, and safeguarding obstacles in the judicial system, and proposed specific reform measures from aspects of optimizing the allocation of judicial functions and powers, implementing the criminal policy of combining leniency with rigidity, and strengthening the judicial team building and the judicial funds guarantee mechanism. China’s judicial system has been continuously improved, and it has won the public’s recognition and support through several rounds of judicial reforms.
First, optimize the allocation of judicial functions and powers and promote impartial and honest judicial administration, including: reform and improve the implementation system of civil administrative cases, and establish a mechanism with unified management and mutually checked separate powers to effectively solve the difficulty in implementation; comprehensively advance the reform that a procuratorate’s right of arresting the abuse-of-power criminals should be checked by its immediate higher level to ensure that higher-level procuratorates could check and oversee its lower levels in arresting criminals, which helps to prevent wrong arrests and the false conduct of “replacing detection with arrest”; work to establish a guiding system for criminal cases to unify the standards in legal judgment, which helps to reduce the phenomenon of “criminals in the same case yet getting different judgments” and develop the system into a visible impartial frame of reference of justice; strengthen prosecutors’ legal supervision on links like criminal registration and investigation, criminal justice, regulatory sites, and alternative implementation of penalties, so that legal supervision would be more effective; rationalize the relationship between courts of higher level and that of lower level, reform the system of trial committees and collegial panels, and independently judge according to law to ensure judicial justice; build transparency into the judiciary, prosecution, police affairs, and prisoners’ affairs, and realize complete transparency in filing information, the law enforcement information, and the process and results of handling a case to ensure that the judicial power is exercised with transparency; improve the system of people’s assessors, and establish that of people’s supervisors, and continuously advance the work of the board for commutation and parole so that the public can participate in the administration of justice, and the supervisors can be supervised; strengthen the democratic supervision and improve and gradually complete the democratic supervision mechanism for non-communists in judicial work; gradually establish the mechanism for online expression of public opinion and polling to further ensure the people’s right to know, participation right, expression right, and supervision right. Through the multi-channeled reforms, the judicial system of China has been advanced and the judicial openness and legal and democratic supervision enhanced. Consequently, the reforms have built transparency into judicial activities and effectively helped the judicial organs to carry out duties and functions prescribed to them by law while refraining from performing functions and duties that are not authorized by law, and helped to solve such problems that the public shows strong concern about. They have also helped to ensure that law is enforced in a strict, impartial, civil, and honest manner, and improves the judicial credibility.
Second, implement the criminal policy of combining leniency with rigidity to promote social harmony and stability, including: revise and improve important laws such as the Criminal Law and the Criminal Procedure Law in order to adjust the constitutional elements of and statuary sentences for crimes severely jeopardizing the social order and improve the penalty structure, which helps to improve the ability to punish serious crimes, and strengthen judicial guarantees for human rights; establish rules for the exclusion of illegal evidence, and a system of audio and video recording during the entire process of interrogating the suspects; implement defense counsel’s right of meeting with criminal suspects, right of reading files, right of investigation and evidence collection to safeguard the lawful rights and interests of criminal suspects and defendants; carry out the death penalty policy of “killing less and cautiously killing people”, reduce the charges of death penalty, strictly limit and carefully apply the death penalty. The Criminal Law Amendment (8) promulgated in 2011 abolished the death penalty for 13 economic non-violent crimes, accounting for 19.1% of the total death penalties and stipulated that the