THE RULE OF LAW IN THE CONTEXT OF CHINA’S SOCIO-ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

The article examines the transformation of the legal system of the People’s Republic of China over the past seventy years and characterizes accordingly six stages in its development in the context of the economic reforms implemented in the country during that time. Based on the fact that the rule of law, protection of human rights and freedoms, compliance of laws with international standards are incompatible with the authoritarian political regime operating in the PRC, the question is considered: can the Chinese «economic miracle» serve as proof of the falsity of the postulate of the rule of law as a necessary condition successful economic development of the state. The results of the analysis allow us to conclude that the evolution of the economy, with the disregard of the rule of law and its transformation into a political tool, is a temporary phenomenon. China’s legal system is an explosive fusion of traditional moral guidelines, economic regulatory norms borrowed from Romano-Germanic and Anglo-Saxon law (without which China’s entry into the international market would have been impossible), and repressive legal levers. It should be noted that the borrowing is mostly superficial: the country remains traditionalist, despite numerous economic reforms in recent decades. And the harsh repressive nature of the law is due not so much to communist principles (they are not correlated with market transformations and individualism of owners) as to the moral categories of the ancient Confucian canon. An economy open to investment and trade is incompatible with an authoritarian system and a single management center, which means the violation of human rights and the leveling of the role of law in the state as a whole. Therefore, an insurmountable obstacle on China’s path to world supremacy remains the lack of formation at the mental and institutional levels of respect for the law as the main regulator of socio-economic relations in the state.