Rule Of Law In China: Progress And Problems - Lin Li

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system; (6) adhere to jointly advancing governing the country according to law, ruling by law, and administering according to law; (7) adhere to the joint construction of the law-based country, law-based government, and law-based society; (8) realize scientific legislation, strict law enforcement, and fair judicature with law-abiding people; and (9) promote the modernization of the state governance system and the state governance capacity. The comprehensive promotion of the rule of law requires that we (1) continue to deepen the reform of the legal system and strengthen the construction of the socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics; (2) promote the rule of Constitution, respecting and maintaining the authority of the Constitution; (3) promote the democratic and scientific legislation, constantly improving the legal system with Chinese characteristics; (4) promote the administration by law, speeding up the establishment of the government under the rule of law; (5) promote judicial justice, establishing an independent, efficient, fair, and authoritative judicial system; (6) encourage everyone to abide by the law, accelerating the construction of a law-based society; (7) promote the rule of law in the armed forces, guaranteeing the Party’s absolute leadership in the armed forces; (8) push forward the construction of the rule of law in local areas, consolidating the practical foundation of the rule of law; and (9) promote international cooperation in the rule of law, achieving a new order in international rule of law. Among them, the most fundamental is to earnestly strengthen and improve the Party’s leadership in the comprehensive promotion of the rule of law.

      Comprehensively advancing the rule of law is an inevitable requirement for the fight against corruption. Power corruption is the enemy of the socialist rule of law, a short board and key to the success or failure of the rule of law, and the biggest obstacle to building a socialist country under the rule of law. The fight against corruption is the struggle that concerns the fate of the ruling Party, the Republic, and the Chinese nation. This is not alarmist. To solve the problem of high incidence, frequent occurrence and reoccurrence of corruption in China, in addition to strictly implementing the strategic deployment and work arrangements by the Central Committee on anti-corruption and clean governance, we should attach more attention to the comprehensive promotion of the rule of law, putting the power into the cage of the legal system, improving the power restriction and supervision mechanism. In addition, we should improve the power restriction and supervision mechanism, make full use of the legal thinking and the legal means to promote the anti-corruption movement, and effectively prevent and solve the problem of power corruption starting from the system, the mechanism and the rule of law. In dealing with and solving the problem of power corruption, China has put forward three stages and three goals, i.e. the goal of the first stage is to let officials fear corruption; the goal of the second stage is to make officials incapable of getting corrupted, and the goal of the third stage is to make officials have no interest in corruption. The action measures that correspond to these three stages and three goals can be summarized as political thinking, law-based thinking, and moral thinking. Generally speaking, the three measures are intertwined, complementary, and interactive with different focuses. From the perspective of political thinking, the basic idea of dealing with corruption is fighting corruption and building a clean government. In history, many political measures, such as “anti-corruption campaign”, “anti-corruption revolution”, and “anti-corruption struggle”, used to be adopted radically. At present, the main measures are to adopt such measures as “high-pressure anti-corruption”, “Party-conduct anticorruption”, and the “strong-power anti-corruption”. Effective methods of deterrence and punishment in the political ecology, such as “high pressure”, “strict punishment”, and “cracking down on both tigers and flies”, are used to achieve the goal of “making officials fear corruption”. From the perspective of law-based thinking, the core idea of dealing with corruption is to govern the country according to law, with laws occupying the supreme position, and with rigid coercion of anti-corruption measures. The emphasis and foothold of anti-corruption are the rule-of-law education, the system standardization, and the legal sanction, with the strictness, authority, norm, mandatory provisions, and heteronomy of the law and system to reach the goal of “making officials incapable of getting corrupted”. From the perspective of moral thinking, the central idea of dealing with corruption is to rule the country with morality, moral education, integrity and self-discipline, and soft constraints. The emphasis and foothold of anti-corruption are education, reclaim, admonition, and enlightenment, with the hope that the people holding public power have self-awareness and self-discipline to achieve the goal of “making officials have no interest in corruption”.

      In dealing with and solving the problem of corruption, legal thinking does not exclude political thinking and moral thinking. Legal thinking is the legal and institutionalized expression of political thinking and moral thinking, and the legal way is the comprehensive application of political mode and rule of virtue in the period of peaceful construction. In fact, the legal thinking must attach great importance to rely on and combine political thinking and moral thinking, give full play to the political advantage and moral function, so as to achieve a thorough victory in the fight against corruption.

      The concept against corruption and for clean government was proposed under political thinking and moral thinking, highlighting the means and objective as “a clean government”; but the idea of “anti-corruption” came out under the legal thinking, highlighting the means and objective as the “governance power”. The phenomena of corruption are ever-changing and there are always various different behaviors of corruption. However, in the final analysis, it is the corruption of public power. If power is not restricted, corruption will inevitably occur—absolute power results in absolute corruption; therefore, every country under the rule of law should divide the power and manage the power by law. There are various forms of corruption in terms of public power, and the causes of public power corruption are not the same, but in the final analysis, it is the rent-seeking of power, which is the corruption of all kinds of subjects mastering and exercising public power. These subjects are basically government officials and public officials. Therefore, the law-based countries should not only manage the power according to law, but also govern officials strictly according to law. In China, administering power according to law and administering officials according to law are the necessary requirements to comprehensively promote the rule of law and the inevitable requirement of anti-corruption and governance under the rule of law. The fight against corruption requires that power must be limited by law, which must be governed by the rule of law.

      Comprehensively advancing the rule of law is a necessary requirement for China’s peaceful rise. The rule of law is not only the symbol of national civilization, but also the connotation and guarantee of national strength. As the basic way of administering the country, the rule of law is an important symbol of the rational development of human political civilization, the fundamental guarantee of human dignity, liberty, human rights, and peaceful co-existence, irrespective of whether it is the civil law, the Anglo-American law system, the Islamic law system, the socialist legal system, the mixed law system, or the other legal cultures. It is the common ideals and long-striving goals of human beings to pursue the rule of law, to realize the noble values, such as permanent peace, security, order, happiness, dignity, human rights, freedom, and justice, through the rule of law, and to have good governance of the country and society with good laws. It is the basic consensus of the people of most countries, including the Chinese people, to uphold the universal values and basic principles of the rule of law, adhering to the historical and cultural traditions and actual conditions of the countries, upholding democracy, safeguarding human rights, choosing the rule of law by abandoning the rule of man, opposing autocracy, and taking the path of political civilization of democracy and the rule of law. It is the universal practice of most human civilizations, including the Chinese civilization. China, as a world power which is rising peacefully and unswervingly on the road to peaceful development, as an important influential developing country which is full of reform vitality, with vigorous economic development, a total economic output in the second place in the world, an excellent cultural tradition of more than 5,000 years, and a long history of Chinese law system, should rejuvenate the Chinese nation with its hard strength, soft power and smart power. It is an indispensable choice for China to choose the rule of law in order to realize the dream of a great country, the dream of a big power, and the dream of rejuvenation. With further development of globalization, the interdependence among countries has reached unprecedented breadth and depth, with intertwined

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