NCJ Number
125493
Journal
Journal of Law and Society Volume: 17 Issue: 2 Dated: (Summer 1990) Pages: 155-169
Date Published
1990
Length
15 pages
Annotation
This article reviews the history of law in the Soviet Union and China prior to and under communism and discusses how the role of law must change in these countries if the impetus toward democracy among the people in these countries is to be effectively structured.
Abstract
In both the Russian parts of the Soviet Union and in China, the western legal tradition and the associated historical reality of a pluralism of non-State-dependent classes, institutions, and courts have been weak or nonexistent. The Communist Party in each of the countries inherited a tradition of internal State dominance and external imperial ambition. China is not and has never been a law-oriented culture. It elevates social relationships and moral duties tied to such relationships over abstract impersonal laws or rights. Whatever law has existed in China has been primarily oriented toward the structuring of an administrative bureaucracy designed to maintain order under State dominance. Democracy requires a system of law and its administration that limits the power of the State and ensures that citizens' rights as defined by law are enforced against the State. In the absence of such a tradition of law in China and the Soviet Union, these countries must create a new legal culture if democratic aspirations are to be fulfilled. This will take time, but no democracy they may succeed in constructing will be secure without it. 3 notes.