This article provides an analytical account of how politics and law in China are
organically integrated in the institutional architecture of courts as designed
by the Chinese Communist Party (“the Party”). This design allows
the Party to retain its supreme authority in the interpretation, application,
and enforcement of the law through its institutional control over courts. At the
same time, the Party can, under this design, also afford to grant an autonomous
sphere where courts can perform their adjudicative functions with minimal
interference from the Party, as long as the Party is assured of full authority
to determine the scope of the “autonomous-zone,” to impose rules
on it, and to revoke it when necessary. Consequently, courts assume a double
character: a pliant political agent on the one hand and a legal institution of
its own agency on the other.