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

with the law, participate in different ways through various channels in managing state affairs, economic and cultural undertakings, and social matters. We must get the people to understand that the law is both a powerful weapon that they can use to safeguard their rights and a code of conduct that they must abide by and strengthen the awareness of all members of society of the need to study, respect, abide by, and apply the law, so that they better understand, observe, and employ the law.

      3.Ensure that everyone is equal before the law. Equality is a basic attribute of socialist law. All organizations and individuals must respect the authority of the Constitution and other laws; confine their activities to the areas prescribed by them; and exercise powers, enjoy rights, and perform duties and obligations in accordance with them. No organization or individual is above the Constitution or any other law. We must safeguard the unity, sanctity, and authority of the country’s legal system, ensure the Constitution and all other laws are effectively enforced, and under no circumstances allow any individual, under any pretext or in any way, to override the law through arbitrary fiats of their own making, place their power above the authority of the law, or bend the law for personal gain. With a focus on regulating and constraining the exercise of public power, we must strengthen oversight; ensure that with power comes responsibility, that the exercise of power is subject to oversight, and that violations of the law are punished; and resolutely put an end to laws being ignored, or not being strictly enforced, and breaches of law going uninvestigated.

      4.Combine rule of law with rule of virtue. The governance of the country and society requires that law and virtue play a joint role. We must apply both the rule of law and the rule of virtue, energetically promote the core socialist values, foster traditional Chinese virtues, and cultivate social morality, professional ethics, family values, and the moral integrity of individuals. We must work hard to ensure that law functions as the standard for behavior and that behavior is inspired by virtue. We must ensure that the rule of law gives expression to virtues and that law better promotes the development of civic morality, while nurturing the rule of law through virtue and strengthening the role morality can play in bolstering a rule-of-law culture, thus ensuring that law and virtue each promote and enhance one another and rule of law and rule of virtue complement each other.

      5.Base our work on the actual situation in China. The path, theories, and system of socialism with Chinese characteristics are fundamentals we must follow in comprehensively advancing the law-based governance of the country. Based on the reality of the Chinese context and in order to keep up with the deepening of reform and opening-up, we must make innovations in the theory of rule of law by reviewing and learning from the Party’s successful experiences of leading the people in implementing the rule of law and by focusing on major theoretical and practical issues concerning the development of socialist rule of law, so as to develop a theory of socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics that is compatible with the actual situation in China and embodies the natural laws of social development and thus gain theoretical guidance and support in advancing the law-based governance of China. We will draw on what is good about traditional Chinese legal culture and learn from those practices of other countries that are useful in developing the rule of law, but we will never indiscriminately copy foreign ideas about or models of rule of law.

      The Resolution points out that the comprehensive advancement of law-based governance of China is a systemic endeavor and a broad and far-reaching revolution in the governance of the country. It will demand long-term hard work. All Party members must uphold the law-based governance of the country with a greater sense of purpose and work more solidly to advance law-based governance, striving to increase the level of rule of law in all the work of the country and to keep moving forward in building China into a rule-of-law country.