In the past, the loyalty most Chinese people's congress deputies felt toward the state completely overwhelmed their sense of responsibility to constituents. Deputies in the Maoist era faced simple and clear expectations to represent the regime to the people and often devastating sanctions if they did not. Ambiguities were few and deputies had limited opportunities to define their own role or to expand their constituency focus. More recently, however, evolving expectations, rapid societal change and institutional reforms have transformed the duties of “people's representatives” and have created deputy identities that are increasingly multi-layered and fraught with contradictions. Deputies now have unprecedented opportunities to improvise on conventional scripts and some have taken on new roles: roles that clash with their traditional responsibilities, and that appear very difficult to reconcile.

The arrest in Shanghai of Hilaire Noulens and his “wife” (their real names were Yakov Rudnik and Tatyana Moiseenko, see below), members of the Communist International's (Comintern) apparat in East Asia, the seizure of a cache of documents concerning the Far Eastern Bureau (FEB) of the Comintern and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the subsequent trial of the Noulens by the Chinese authorities, and the interest taken in the case by numerous Communist-led organizations and fellow-travelling intellectuals was a cause célèbre in the early 1930s, in the foreign community in China as well as in Europe and North America. Despite having been compared to the notorious Sacco-Vanzetti case, and having been nearly as spectacular and important as the 1927 raid on the Soviet Embassy in Peking, the Noulens Affair as a whole has not been the subject of any reliable study.

Efforts at legal reform in China under the banner of the socialist legal system (shehui zhuyi fazhi) represent an attempt by the post-Mao regime to rest legitimacy in part on an ideology of formal law that complements the regime's efforts at economic reform. While the Party has not abandoned its reliance on the conceit that it represents the forces of historical revolution, the establishment of the socialist legal system is aimed to some extent at addressing a more immediate challenge of retaining legitimacy in the eyes of a populace for whom abstract notions of historical determinacy have little meaning. Proponents of reform have linked these abstract and practical aspects of legitimacy by asserting that legal reform is a requirement of the specific stage of historical development in which China now finds itself.

This yellow river, it so happens, bred a nation identified by its yellow skin pigment. Moreover, this nation also refers to its earliest ancestor as the Yellow Emperor. Today, on the face of the earth, of every five human beings there is one that is a descendant of the Yellow Emperor.