Courts on the Campaign Path in China: Criminal Court Work in the "Yanda 2001" Anti-Crime Campaign

It is now commonly known that the call for a national transformation of economic and social conditions in post-1978 China occasioned an unprecedented shift in the approach to justice administration in the people’s courts. A new era of socialist legality was intended to usher in a clear departure from the repressive and arbitrary political-legal practices of the Cultural Revolution. Along with this call for a new age of legality was a plethora of progressive and reformist legal discourses—“equality before the law,” “independent administration of justice,” and “handling cases according to the law”—that were promoted together with judicial training programs and the implementation of the first comprehensive criminal code of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The reforms engendered an expectation that law would function as a means of delivering the democratic ideal of governance promised in the Third Plenum of the 11th Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee in December 1978. The “systematization” and institutionalization of democracy in law was conceived as a social process whereby institutions would foster a sense of respect for law among the citizenry. These expectations of legal reform also placed legislative and procedural changes in a moral context of developing a sound socialist spiritual civilization (shehui zhuyi jingshen wenming). Part of the courts process of developing sound spiritual civilization involved a call for judicial staff to transform themselves into professionals: to become models of propriety in carrying out