The interaction between the millennial dominant orientations of Chinese culture and the entire impact of modernization and of Marxism-Leninism is a story that is unfolding before our eyes, and we have no neat formula for predicting its outcome

By focusing on legal reforms this Special Issue of The China Quarterly draws attention to a group of institutions whose fate is crucial for China's future. The economic reforms that have transformed China since the late 1970s are generating new institutions and transactions that demand legal definition. The surge of foreign direct investment that has made China the world's largest capital-importing country makes necessary further development of the legal framework for foreign trade and investment. More-over, forces broader and needs deeper than those produced by economic development will also help to impel Chinese law reforms.

When the Chinese leadership turned its attention to creating a legal order after the end of the Cultural Revolution, one of its expressed concerns was to reduce official arbitrariness. Even though the totalitarian grip of the Chinese Communist Party has weakened since then, concerns about arbitrariness are no less and can only increase. Furthermore, if China is to cope with the many problems that are by-products of economic reform, including a decline in social order, spreading corruption and a general crisis of values, it will need strong legal institutions and a legal culture that promotes the rule of law. The rule of law has become an issue for many more Chinese than just their leaders or intellectuals.

Thirty years ago, in his landmark study of how “a bill becomes a law” in the United States, Daniel Berman reminded constitutional scholars that policy-making processes have an enormous impact on the content of the laws they produce, and are not mere “technical devices” designed to permit orderly Congressional lawmaking. This article begins from the assertion that 16 years after the beginning of China's post-Mao political and legal reforms, scholars of Chinese politics and law need to pay greater attention to the impact which lawmaking processes have on the content of the laws and policies that this system produces. Specifically, it asks the following questions. First, how are national-level laws drafted in post-Mao China, and what are the politics of the lawmaking process? Secondly, what factors in the process affect the “life chances” of a particular draft law? That is, why do some laws win a place on the legislative agenda, while most drafts languish in obscurity, and still others emerge briefly, only to disappear later into the bureaucratic swamp? And finally, what systematic impact, if any, do the politics of the lawmaking process have on the content of the laws which the system produces?

The legal regime for foreign investment in the People's Republic of China over the past 15 years has reflected a basic tension between encouraging foreign business activities and maintaining state control over them. While China's policies may be viewed as attempts to pursue an independent path towards development, neo-classical and critical perspectives on the role of the state in economic development provide useful contexts within which to view the PRC's efforts at harnessing foreign investment in pursuit of economic growth. This article reviews the structure and performance of foreign investment law and policy in the People's Republic of China in the context of these alternative approaches to the role of the state in economic development.