Gloria Davies’ chapter focuses on two aspects of ideology that help to determine how we can look at law in China. She contrasts two different ways of thinking about ideology, one implicit and the other explicit. She first considers how the disciplinary rules and conventions of academic work sustain the discursive dominance of certain patterns of understanding. Second, she looks at the dominance of ideology under Xi Jinping, particularly how it has worked to undermine academic inquiry in China in some areas and to produce a more explicitly political understanding of China’s ‘socialist rule of law’ in others. With these issues in mind, she explores Party ideology as a cultural and linguistic phenomenon of China’s Party-state system. She argues that to the extent that ideology is shaped by spoken and written communications, texts and images, its imprint as a dominant pattern of understanding is contingent as much on the persuasiveness of what it promises and represents as on its institutional entrenchment.

Adam Knight’s study on China’s social credit system examines how the Party-state is currently harnessing technology to automate processes for consolidating and expanding its power. Knight traces the development of the system from its origins as a ‘technology of risk’ in the financial services market to its current-day role as a disciplinary ‘technology of regulation’, in operation to realise a state-arbitered moral ideal. The social credit system has evolved in recent years on two fronts, organisationally and conceptually. Organisationally, social credit’s evolution reflects a movement in policy innovation and implementation from the centre to the periphery. Conceptually, social credit has developed from a narrow policy goal to an increasingly broad array of punishment and reward initiatives as part of a political move by the Party to promote the ideological spread of what Knight calls chengxin (诚信) culture (‘sincerity and honesty’ culture) under Xi Jinping.

Ling Li’s chapter focuses on how the Party operates in the governance space in China, using the evolution of the disciplinary regime of the Chinese Communist Party to demonstrate what she sees as the defining feature of China’s single-party state: two separate seats of power and sources of legitimation which enable the Party to use a variety of ways to impose authoritarian control over state affairs. Her analysis of the particular organisational features of China’s Party-state draws on a description of the evolution of this dualism and on the historical development of anti-corruption institutions as an exemplar of how the Party governs through supervision and discipline in China. She connects this discussion with the contemporary development of the National Supervision Commission. In this way, the chapter presents an historical evolution that can explain the establishment of the Commission, which represents the apex of Party-state disciplinary and supervisory ambitions in China today.

This chapter examines the ideological spectrum within which law operates in China. It finds that ideology is not merely an external device that sits outside the law to justify or rationalise legal rules, actions and decisions. Rather, ideology is intrinsic to the logic of legal rules and the organisation of the state in China. Since it is the architectural scaffolding within which law operates, ideology permeates all aspects of the law in China. Given this relationship between law and ideology, the authors argue that it is necessary to study in greater depth the ‘top-level design’ that the Chinese Communist Party envisages using to reach its overall end-goal of ‘national rejuvenation’. In teasing out the conceptual components of this end-goal, including its historical antecedents, the logic by which the Party has made law into a pillar of this overarching political project becomes clear.

Through studying the evolution of three aspects of statecraft – what is the purpose of politics? who should be in charge? and by what method should they govern to achieve that purpose? – this chapter sketches the epistemological framework that structures the Chinese Communist Party’s worldview. First, this worldview is teleological – the purpose of politics is to achieve the Utopian promises made by Marxist doctrine – and echoes concepts of harmony predominant in the imperial age. Second, it requires rule by a knowledge elite. Third, the Party has developed a methodology by which it claims to be able to set the agenda, identify circumstances and tasks, and guide implementation. This worldview is essentially monist. Under this conception, and in line with the requirements of harmony, any social conflict or contradiction is, in se, illegitimate and needs to be resolved. This has considerable implications for the space that law is given in the statecraft of the Party.

In his study of Chinese Communist Party rule-of-law doctrine, Ewan Smith argues that in the Xi Jinping era, Party leadership has shifted the dominant understanding that rule of law functions to rectify institutions to the understanding that it ‘rectifies’ or disciplines individuals as state and non-state actors. The rule of law has been explicitly subordinated to ‘Party Leadership’, and the law has been recast as one form of social control among many. Moreover, the rule of law under Xi is explicitly superstructural. It yields to basic economic changes, including China’s development needs. Moreover, whereas earlier accounts suggest a foreign idea under cautious inspection, Party doctrine under Xi identifies rule of law in China as indigenous and largely unrelated to Western accounts. These shifts in the Party’s frame of reference in relation to rule of law see it now as not merely an ephemeral concept but a ‘superstructural concept’, relativised as ‘Socialist Rule of Law with Chinese Characteristics’ in the new era.

Samuli Seppänen examines the issue of Chinese Communist Party rules in the organisation of the Party-state and their relationship to the overall rule-of-law system. His focus is on scholarly arguments that centre around how we are to understand ways in which the Party governs itself and society. A curious twist in rule-of-law ideology has emerged: recent institutional reforms developed under the banner of rule of law have coincided with equally prominent efforts to establish a ‘rational’ system of intraparty regulations within the Party. But why continue to promote law-based governance while seemingly working to undermine that governance through the expansion of a Party disciplinary and supervision regime? These moves have prompted some scholars to take on a ‘commonsense’ approach: to assume, following an instrumentalist tradition, that the ‘political’ and the ‘legal’ are not necessarily in tension with each other since they both sit under a system of ‘rule by regulations’. Seppänen problematises the commonsense narrative by describing an alternative way of understanding ‘the political’ in China.

This chapter looks at the Chinese Communist Party’s ‘new-type political-party system’ announced in 2018 and at related attempts by the Party-state to export its governance ethos in international contexts. The People’s Republic of China leadership’s assertion is that there is a China model of governance that is not just an alternative, but actually superior, to a structure based on separation of powers. Since its projection of its governance strengths are nowadays propagated across the globe, the words that the Party-state uses to describe its structure of governance matter both domestically and internationally, as it reaches beyond borders with money, surveillance technology and military hardware, and into international organisations. Within this context, Lewis cautions against validating some of the discourse of the current Party approach to governance in international arenas such as the UN Human Rights Council as an attractive alternative to traditional understandings of government based on a separation of powers.