This chapter examines key assertions about the nature of law and morality under the Xi Jinping administration, identifying that these assertions have been to frame and embed the Chinese Communist Party leadership’s ambitions ‘to lead over everything’ through greater supervision and discipline, including promoting morality-based ‘self-discipline’. In doing so, this chapter firstly looks at the rule of law discourse in the Xi era: how it has come to describe not only state law but also Party rules and modes of governance, including ‘governing the country by moral virtue’. This chapter then identifies how the current discourse has reignited the ideological import of morality from the Mao era and imperial political ideas to affirm the Party’s contemporary moral supremacy to ‘govern the nation according to law’ through socialist core values. Thus in China today, a particular brand of socialist morality is integrated into the overall legal–political mix to shape and justify the ideology of law–morality amalgam being instrumental to the Party’s ambition to bring about a rejuvenated and spiritually civilised well-off society.

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.

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.