• The rule of law

The rule of law

The US government has announced an initiative to promote the 'rule of law' in the People’s Republic of China. However, though China has also endorsed building the rule of law as a goal, the American and Chinese views of what rule of law entails differ substantially. This paper explains how in order to deal with this divergence in goals, the US has adopted a 'Trojan Horse' strategy: the belief is that the Chinese will allow US-sponsored law reform programs for economic reasons, but once established, these programmes will lead to broader political reform. However, this view is not well-supported by theory or empirical evidence.

The goal of this paper is to identify the most important elements of the theory of law and  social change implicit in the China Rule of Law Initiative and related programmes, and to reflect on  those theoretical suppositions in light of the available scholarly research.

The authors considers:

• how rule of law made it onto the Sino-US bilateral agenda
• the objective of rule of law reform as perceived by the US and the Chinese governments
• the US strategy for promoting its vision of the rule of law, and the theoretical model of law and society that underlies this strategy

The author assesses the US strategy for promoting it’s vision in light of the existing academic literature, concluding that the model of legal change implicit in this strategy may have serious problems.

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