Chinese Communist Party Leadership and Yifa Zhiguo in The Xi Era

A Law Unto Itself
Author(s): Susan Trevaskes

Source: Modern China , July 2018, Vol. 44, No. 4 (July 2018), pp. 347-373
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Yifa zhiguo in the Xi Era
Susan Trevaskes1
Abstract
This article explores the political significance of “governing the nation in
accordance with the law” 依法治国 (yifa zhiguo) in the Xi Jinping era. It
examines party statements and propaganda about the necessity of exercising
party leadership over all key aspects of law-based governance, particularly
the politico-legal system. The aim is to understand the strategic need for
yifa zhiguo as part of the ideological repertoire of the Xi leadership. The
argument is that yifa zhiguo is essentially an ideological and strategic message
about power relations under Xi and the capacity of the party to withstand
various threats to its credibility and thus ultimately to bring about the
nation’s and party’s rejuvenation.
Keywords
Governing the Nation in Accordance with the Law, yifa zhiguo, Xi Jinping,
politico-legal reform, stability, China
Yifa zhiguo 依法治国 is an imperative call to “govern the nation in accor-

dance with the law.” It is commonly understood in English as socialist rule of
law governance or law-based governance.1 First given discursive air in the
mid-1990s during the Jiang Zemin era, yifa zhiguo initially signaled the
1Griffith University, Nathan, Queensland, Australia
Corresponding Author:
Susan Trevaskes, School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, Griffith University,
Nathan Campus, Building N16 Room 2:45, Nathan, Queensland 4111, Australia.
Email: S.Trevaskes@griffith.edu.au

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348 Modern China 44(4)
intention of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to institute a comprehen-

sive system of law-based governance. The term was further used to promul-
gate and validate the governance agenda through the Hu Jintao era of the
2000s, and still has an active discursive life in the Xi Jinping era. However,
this does not signal continuity in approach to governance. Indeed, because
governance agendas shift each decade as the party leadership group changes,
the rhetorical terms deployed to badge a governance style need to be fluid in
meaning to accommodate these vicissitudes. As such, yifa zhiguo has multi-
ple nuances that make it both enduring and ripe for political leverage. In this
article, I argue that since 2013, Xi Jinping’s leadership has endowed the term
with a new, more engaging, and more potent political life. Rather than solely
about institution building for a socialist rule of law as originally conceived in
the mid-1990s, in its new life yifa zhiguo is predominantly about fortifying
and legitimizing the CCP’s leadership through law over state institutions.
At the time of its inception in the 1990s, party circles never intended yifa
zhiguo to be a call for the separation of party and state. However, its associa-
tion with socialist rule of law certainly created growing expectations of
greater checks and balances in terms of accountability.2 Observers have long
assumed that with strengthened legal institutions, judicial independence, and
constitutionalism, the need for a high degree of party involvement in state
affairs would lessen. As yifa zhiguo–generated checks and balances gained
teeth, the need for a continual assertion of direct party involvement in the
day-to-day functioning of state would decline.
The historic decision of the CCP Central Committee adopted at the Fourth
Plenum of the Eighteenth Party Congress in October 2014 put paid to these
assumptions. The 2014 decision is the first in the history of the People’s
Republic of China (PRC) to focus exclusively on yifa zhiguo. Two state-
ments in particular, both of them new to the repertoire of socialist ideology,
boldly reassert the party’s leading role in all key agendas of lawmaking and
enforcement. One is that “the party’s leadership and socialist rule of law are
compatible” 党的领导和社会主义法治是一致的. The other, an impera-
tive, is that “leadership must be implemented across the entire process of
governing the country in accordance with the law” 把党的领导贯彻到依法
治国全过程 (Fourth Plenum Decision, 2014; CPC News, 2014) (my empha-
sis). These statements overtly reflect what in recent years has been taking
place on the ground through reorganizing key politico-legal institutions and
recentralizing power in the hands of Xi Jinping and his close allies so as to
gain more direct rule of security and legal institutions across the nation (Ji,
2016; Johnson, 2016; Jianfu Chen, 2016; Ling, 2017). Moves include estab-
lishment of the National Supervision Commission (NSC) 国家监察委员会,
the mega monitoring and supervision body that explicitly merges party and

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Trevaskes 349
state anti-corruption agencies (Li, 2017). In important ways, this commis-

sion’s amalgam of party and state bodies “through law” has followed from a
conceptual shift in the way that the party articulates its relations to the state
and to the law. The Xi administration’s overall governance agenda is as
much about 治国 (governing the nation) as it is about 依法 (in accordance
with the law). The administration’s governance agenda aims to bring the two
concepts together in much closer alignment than in previous periods. This
has been achieved by centralizing control to monitor the state through the
state-party amalgam, with law as its glue. Hence we find that the NSC is
justified as part of Xi’s overall yifa zhiguo ambitions (Zhu and Qi, 2017),
with the ideological rationale for these ambitions having emerged in stages
since 2014 to lay the conceptual groundwork for this bold move to merge
party and state under a mammoth surveillance model of governance.
In recent years, official discourse on yifa zhiguo has indeed paved the way
for this historic change in the supervising of state power. Throughout 2013,
China’s media and scholarly circles featured a spirited constitutionalism
debate (Creemers, 2015) that was eventually suppressed by the Xi leadership.
Constitutional theorists outside the party structure had pointed to the strong
need for separation between government processes and sources of authority
that included party disciplinary rules and regulations. After shutting down
debate, the Xi leadership bolstered the political weight of concepts such as
procedural justice and transparency and stripped away any Western-liberal
connotations from these ideas. For instance, “procedural justice” is now a
major party-led reform goal under the auspices of a reform agenda called
“making the trial central to the criminal process” 以审判为中心 (Biddulph,
Nesossi, and Trevaskes, 2017), which itself is under the rubric of yifa zhiguo,
according to the 2014 Fourth Plenum decision. Reforms to institutionalize
firmer party supervision of state operations have been hailed as an important
example of how party officials can “govern the nation using moral virtue” 以
德治国 (Xinhua News, 2016a; Shen, 2017; Sina News, 2017), or “rule by
moral virtue” for short. As a result of these reform moves including establish-
ment of the NSC, the calls by leading legal scholars in 2013 for separation
between party and state have been replaced by party talk of “integration,”
with government and security organs now, more than ever before, account-
able to a party leadership that acts over, as well as through, the rule of law
(Zhu, 2014; Xinhua News, 2016a).
While party-state integration has been intensified through reforms of
bureaucratic, legal, and security institutions, these reforms have been pre-
ceded by a discursive reworking of the yifa zhiguo narrative through the par-
ty’s propaganda machine (see Li, 2015; Seeking Truth, 2015). From late
2013, propagandists began to incrementally accentuate the role of the party in

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all aspects of lawmaking, law reform, and law enforcement. Party theorists
began accentuating Xi Jinping’s position on yifa zhiguo—not more of the
same; something new. For instance, in 2014 prominent party theorist Wang
Liming (2014) declared that China had entered its third main iteration of the
theorization of rule of law, following from the first by Deng Xiaoping and the
second by Jiang Zemin. This third iteration, Wang explained, began with Xi
Jinping assuming the leadership of the party in late 2012. The Xi leadership
has progressively refined and boldly asserted China’s yifa zhiguo narrative
framework as the key means through which the party rules the nation. To this
end, the party has sharpened the ideological relationship between the law and
party leadership: not redefined yifa zhiguo as a new concept, but amplified
the always there but until now largely silent declaration of party supremacy
over all key aspects of government (Jianfu Chen, 2016). Xi Jinping could
thus assert that socialist rule of law alone is no longer sufficient to ensure
clean and accountable government. The crux of the yifa zhiguo imperative,
according to Xi, is that “the party must lead all rule of law activities including
legislation, law enforcement, administration of justice and law observance”
(Sina News, 2016).
Under Xi Jinping, yifa zhiguo has been loaded with new political clout
and elevated to the forefront of the current leadership’s national governance
narrative where it functions as a dominant tifa 提法—the correct way of
referring to a term, usually political (Schoenhals, 1992; Brady, 2009; Link,
2013; Davies, 2009). The discussion in this article explores the elevation of
yifa zhiguo to this status as Xi Jinping’s premier governance-related tifa. It
considers the process of, and reasons for, this elevation through official
propaganda from 2014 to 2017. It also explains how, as the party’s premier
governance tifa, “governing the nation in accordance with the law” now
operates conceptually and in practice as a key ideological tool to discur-
sively identify and affirm the power relationships through which the nation
is governed.
The task of constructing the meaning of yifa zhiguo as a national party
governance tifa has been to embed a hitherto rarely stated assumption into
public understanding: the acknowledgment that the party must exercise lead-
ership over all aspects of state governance. Party leaders recognize this move
as essential; political narrative, with its essence captured for popular con-
sumption in tifa, is always instrumental in setting down and legitimizing
shifts in political thinking, a necessary foundation for implementing these
shifts through institutional practice. But this particular tifa is for more than
popular consumption since it is also intended to reframe thinking—and most
importantly, behavior—inside the party. In the context of endemic and insti-
tutionalized corruption among public officials, this tifa is also for enforcing

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Trevaskes 351
legality among members of the party at all levels so that the party and those
who act in its name do indeed, in practice, “govern the nation in accordance
with the law.” Legitimizing this shift in tifa thinking (about yifa zhiguo) to
legitimize the shift in political thinking (about the party’s preeminence in
governance) therefore has particular political import. This new accentuation
on the party leading through yifa zhiguo builds on existing ideology in rela-
tion to the people and the constitution. Therefore, the construction of the
newly dominant meaning of yifa zhiguo was cast as merely accentuating an
already legitimate meaning, rather than imposing a new one.
The article has two sections. The first presents an overview of Xi Jinping–
era propaganda on yifa zhiguo and compares the way the term is understood
today with how it was understood when it was first espoused, in the Jiang
Zemin era two decades earlier. The second section explores the political sig-
nificance of yifa zhiguo and its role as a leading tifa in the Xi era. It considers
the tasks of propaganda work in reconstructing the party narrative under the
new leadership, exploring how ideological tools such as socialist dialectics
have been harnessed to construct party-centric yifa zhiguo as a prominent tifa
of the Xi-era governance narrative. Positioning this tifa as a central party
governance platform has entailed use of propaganda statements that assert
the importance of the relationships between three central components: “the
people,” the constitution, and the imperative call to “rule with moral virtue,”
which is the prerogative and the responsibility of the party.
The Yifa zhiguo Narrative in Party Propaganda

The Nineteenth Party Congress in October 2017 unveiled a new statement
that has been inserted into the party constitution: “The party exercises overall
leadership covering all areas of endeavor in every part of the country” 党领
导一切, 全称为”党政军民学, 东西南北中, 党是领导一切的 (Xinhua
News, 2017b). A literal translation is “party, government, military, society
and schools—east, west, south, north and middle—the party leads all.” “Party
leadership” and yifa zhiguo have taken on a new life together in the post post–
Nineteenth Party Congress era and in the years leading up to the congress.
The constitution has also been amended to include the phrase, “The leader-
ship of the Communist Party of China is the defining feature of socialism
with Chinese characteristics.” One party theorist now declares that as an
important political task in the new era, “we should profoundly comprehend
the essence of Xi Jinping’s socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new
era and focus on studying the new requirements of Xi Jinping’s new thesis on
governing the country in accordance with the law” (Wang, 2018). Another
declares that “Xi Jinping’s Nineteenth Party Congress report in late 2017

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establishes the principle of imbedding ‘governing the country in accordance

with the law’ in all its various aspects as an important basic strategy of
upholding and developing socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new
era” (Wang 2017).
Assertions about Xi Jinping’s “new thesis on governing the country in
accordance with the law” reflect a new ideological twist to the existing politi-
cal storyline of yifa zhiguo. This new twist has been worked into a series of
party statements about yifa zhiguo from 2014 to the present day, building on
Jiang Zemin–era proclamations about its nature and characteristics. Let us
consider this propaganda role, since it is effectively yifa zhiguo’s narrative
journey to party-governance tifa status.
Yifa zhiguo and Propaganda Work

The party has long used tools of propaganda work 宣传工作 to publicize new
party lines in the party’s narratives (Shambaugh, 2007; Brady, 2008, 2009).
The themes and messages delivered by party propaganda help party leaders
to construct a signature political narrative that distinguishes their leadership
era from that of their predecessors. From the early 1980s, justice agencies
were allocated a specific type of work known as rule of law propaganda work
法治宣传.3 This work is specific to the politico-legal system and was initi-
ated as part of a nationwide endeavor to effect the social transformation of the
individual and society. Under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, the party
sought to implement legal construction and reform by, among other actions,
promoting a new public and government mindset in opposition to the Maoist
era “rule of man” (Trevaskes, 2004, 2017a, 2017b). This was an attempt to
instill in the hearts and minds of the citizenry a new consciousness of law as
something institutionalized through courts and government agencies, as a
basis for both economic modernization and a sound spiritual civilization.
Rule of law propaganda was undertaken in the 1980s to help cultivate a
society that obeyed and respected the law, and thus was conducive to compre-
hensive long-term social order (Wu, 1992: 234–35). Law dissemination and
education 普法教育 (pufa jiaoyu) activities at the time were closely aligned
with an all-out rule of law propaganda drive intended to rid China of any
remnants of the rule-of-man system that had helped generate the chaos of
both the late 1950s and the Cultural Revolution. For more than three decades
from the mid to late 1980s, the party-state has continuously run five-year law
dissemination and education activities that promote the promulgation of all
major laws. These activities are organized by the Ministry of Justice under
the ideological guidance of the party and in alliance with justice-system
agencies, including the courts and prosecution offices (Cho, 2014b). Well

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Trevaskes 353
before the first pufa jiaoyu campaigns were officially launched in 1985, pri-
mary schools, secondary schools, and universities in many regions had begun
conducting legal education classes. So too had government work units across
the country (Wu, 1992: 236).
From the outset, these campaigns were aimed to help ensure the success of
an economic reform agenda that required a turnaround in the mindset of citi-
zens through their understanding of how power is exercised and how social
relations are regulated (i.e., through law). These campaigns were based on
the premise that a legally literate citizenry is an essential component of mod-
ernization. Throughout the years from the mid to the late 1990s, the relatively
general message about the benefits of rule of law over rule of man was pro-
gressively replaced with a more specific, law-based governance message
about how the country should be ruled (Cho, 2014a). This new political line
required a new slogan, yifa zhiguo, introduced as a concept by President
Jiang Zemin. Yifa zhiguo was made the platform on which the laws of the
party-state were to be institutionalized in China. The 1980s rule of law mes-
sage was gradually reshaped into a new model of governance that overlapped
individual administrative, legislative, and judicial reforms with party reform
(Cho, 2014a). Standardization of law-based governance was the new tune of
party-state rule. A series of new laws was introduced from the 1990s aimed at
better supervising and limiting administrative power.4 In short, yifa zhiguo
became a political institutionalization strategy for implementing various
political reforms and reforms in state and social organizations (Cho, 2014a).
Jiang Zemin promulgated yifa zhiguo at the Fifteenth Party Congress in
1997 as a key symbol of state governance and it was inserted into the consti-
tution in 1999. The congress decision declared yifa zhiguo a basic strategy of
development in China, as well as “an important hallmark of social and cul-
tural progress, and a vital guarantee for the lasting political stability of the
country” (Wang, 2014). Party theorist Wang Liming regards 1997 to 2012 as
the second stage of the ideological development of rule of law. He claims this
second stage involved the presentation of the yifa zhiguo strategy as “the
summation and enhancement of our party’s experience in ruling the country.
It marks a historic leap in the party’s concept of guidance and leadership”
(Wang, 2014). Wang declares this a significant milestone, moving to a system
where “law is no longer a mere instrument of government, but . . . a basis and
foundation of the state system, a basic strategy of governing a state.” The
focus during this period of yifa zhiguo was on building the legal machinery
for “administering the nation in accordance with the law” as a means of
achieving the construction of law-based government by 2010. This included
“tightening supervision over law enforcement and promoting the exercise of
administrative functions according to law” (Wang, 2014).5

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While yifa zhiguo remained a key political catchword after the turn to the
new century, after 2002 a new party leadership team headed by Hu Jintao
initiated a set of political priorities and propaganda messages that were grad-
ually fashioned into a new overall political platform focused on dealing with
the unsightly by-products and troubling social accompaniments of rapid eco-
nomic growth: social disharmony, social dissent, and social disorder. The
party’s new Harmonious Society platform began to take hold from 2002. The
basic pufa jiaoyu (law dissemination and education) messages about institu-
tionalizing law remained intact. But now Harmonious Society was promoted
parallel to the rule of law as a new way of dealing with social inequity and
social antagonisms. Pufa jiaoyu campaigns were conducted throughout the
first decade of the 2000s. Courts also continued their propaganda work, par-
ticularly in the early 2000s, with an annual Law Dissemination and Education
Day. Each year this work highlighted a particular theme. In 2001, for instance,
it was Strengthen the Concept of the Constitution, Promote Governing the
Nation in Accordance with the Law 加强宪法观念, 推进依法治国. In 2008,
it was Promote the Spirit of the Rule of Law, and Serve Scientific Development
弘扬法治精神, 服务科学发展 (Trevaskes, 2017a).
Yifa zhiguo as a Tifa

The current Xi administration sees a strategic need to place yifa zhiguo at the
center of the party’s ideological messaging about party-state governance in
China today, particularly in relation to, indeed through, the legal system.
Stressing the imperative for the party to lead all processes of the law is a way
of ensuring that provincial and local party representatives clean up their cor-
rupt behavior and that of their local membership in key positions of power. It
is also an attempt to sanitize the party’s image and to reaffirm the responsibil-
ity of the party to govern lawfully. But as the discussion below reveals, the
message currently conveyed in yifa zhiguo propaganda is more complex than
these surface-level interpretations suggest.
Here I argue that yifa zhiguo has been rhetorically reworked to implant into
national understanding the two most important strategic messages about ulti-
mate power. One is that in governance and in the party, power relations are
ultimately under Xi Jinping as the core of the party. The other is that the party
has the necessary capacity to withstand threats to its credibility, and so, ulti-
mately, to maintain its hold on power. To implant these messages in its propa-
ganda, the party has resuscitated the Confucian notion of moral virtue that was
popular in the Jiang Zemin era.6 Current political propaganda draws on some
important ideological markers that identify the party’s capacity to rule over all
law-related state activities, including legislation, law enforcement, administra-
tion of justice, and law observance, with moral virtue. In Xi’s China, the party’s

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Trevaskes 355
role in building the rule of law has therefore been substantially upgraded. Party
theorists and politicians can no longer assert that for rule of law to work in
China it merely needs to be institutionalized judiciously through correct legis-
lative and judicial channels, replete with enforceable checks and balances.
Now, even when enforced through rigorous checks and balances, the law can-
not of itself secure effective government accountability. The law alone is there-
fore no longer enough to perfect a rule of law society: such perfection also
requires the embedding of party leadership to implement the law effectively.
The new narrative asserts the need for party leadership in all facets of China’s
judicial, security, and anti-corruption bodies, requiring that the party leaders
rule by means of their moral virtue (Xinhua News, 2016a). The Fourth Plenum
decision thus insists that rule of law and rule by moral virtue be integrated with
each other (Fourth Plenum Decision, 2014).
A central message of this propaganda is the party’s self-confidence in
asserting its leadership. Here is confidence in and affirmation of the ability of
party-state actors to govern in a way that does not abuse their power. Good
governance comes not merely through perfecting the law to improve account-
ability mechanisms, but importantly through more thoroughly and compre-
hensively embedding party supervisory powers within the state to ensure
clean governance. Since this governance narrative constructed under Xi fore-
grounds yifa zhiguo as a tifa, to understand how this narrative has been con-
structed we turn to the role of tifa in party-state narrative-building.
Tifa have been a common presence in Chinese politics since the People’s
Republic was established in 1949, and their use as governance-framing
mechanisms is well acknowledged in scholarly literature (e.g., Schoenhals,
1992; Link, 2013). For the 1950s political discourse scholar Li Ch’i, tifa is a
“slogan-like formation” (Li, cited in Alvaro 2013: 147), for Michael
Schoenhals tifa are “ways of putting things” (cited in Link, 2013: 274), for
Anne Marie Brady, a tifa is “the proper way of referring to something” (2009:
445). The political utility of a tifa comes from its capacity to frame and
thereby set limits on how a given topic or issue can be used in public dis-
course. By serving as the way 法 of “referring to” 提 a particular concept, a
tifa determines the boundaries for that topic or issue in public discussion.
When a new party leadership team comes to power, it usually sets new inter-
pretations of socialist values and principles into an existing tifa to both steer
and limit public discussion about the topic or issue as per the political utility
valued by these leaders. Thus tifa have a “framing effect” (Brady, 2009: 445)
that limits the conceptual horizons of the people they reach. As Perry Link
asserts, “tifa are ‘forms of power’ not just because brutish power can stand
behind them and force their acceptance. They have an intrinsic power, too,
when they cut off alternative ways of thinking and limit the conceptual hori-
zons of the people who adopt them” (2013: 176).

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Link’s explanation provides useful insights for understanding both the

workings of yifa zhiguo as tifa of the Xi leadership’s governance narrative
and its consequent value to the party leadership. Asserting the party leader-
ship’s position over and through the law in critical areas of governance is
supremely important to the Xi leadership. But it entails the leadership’s seri-
ous, potentially foreboding claim over ultimate power, which magnifies the
importance of gaining acceptance by the people. The governance narrative,
and therefore yifa zhiguo as tifa, have had an intrinsic job to perform in intro-
ducing and embedding among the people this leadership’s understanding of
the party’s ultimate power in governing the nation. This step to cultivate the
people’s understanding is essential in gaining their acceptance, and therefore
in providing the vital underlay of legitimacy for the leadership to move
beyond narrative into practice. Furthermore, this message was to reach not
just the people at large, but also party members who would need to demon-
strate the new power configuration and modify their behavior accordingly.
In assembling its new governance narrative, the Xi leadership reconstructed
the meanings that yifa zhiguo had conveyed for over twenty years, to make
them consistent with the party’s reframing of power relations. Now yifa zhiguo
was to serve as this narrative’s tifa, to effectively provide the discursive frame
for the party’s political reframing of power, and in so doing help to validate this
move. However, the Xi leadership’s reframing of power relations is inherently
problematical in practice. The party’s leadership (notably through its power
embedded in the NSC) is explicitly positioned above state bodies, including the
National People’s Congress (NPC), which, according to Article 57 of the con-
stitution, is the highest organ of state power.7 The inherent contradictions that
could be seen to emerge in the governance narrative as a consequence of inte-
grating the party and the state in practice require that yifa zhiguo as the narra-
tive’s tifa has a simultaneously convincing and pliable meaning. Constructing/
maintaining this narrative has called for knowledge of party, history, and ideol-
ogy, for strategic savvy, and certainly for creative thinking. In the following
section, we unpack the process of reconstructing yifa zhiguo to serve as a vital
tifa for the Xi leadership’s new governance narrative.
Reworking the Narrative to Defend the Idea of

Party-Led Yifa zhiguo
As mentioned above, the party-state has implemented five-year law dissemi-
nation and education campaigns continuously since the mid-1980s. The new
Xi-era yifa zhiguo platform is the centerpiece of China’s Seventh Five-Year
Law Dissemination and Education Campaign from 2016 to 2020. In early
2016, a Communist Party propaganda tome 七五普法学习问答 (Questions

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Trevaskes 357
and Answers on the Seventh Five-Year Law Dissemination Campaign) was

published and disseminated to functionaries nationwide to set up the new yifa
zhiguo platform as the focus of China’s Seventh Five-Year Law Dissemination
and Education Campaign. This training manual explains to cadres the party’s
current interpretation of rule of law and how to promote it. It expounds on the
relationship between party leadership, rule of law, and the people’s interests.
The excerpt below is the authors’ response to the question, “Why is there a
requirement that party leadership must be implemented through [the conduit
of] yifa zhiguo?”:
Rule of law is the means of institutionalizing the status of the Chinese

Communist Party’s leadership. Maintaining the party’s leadership is the main
requirement of the socialist rule of law. It is the very life of the party and
government and it is the main way of guaranteeing the interests and happiness
of the people. It is the essence of the concept of governing the nation according
to the law. . . . It is only through the leadership of the party that “governing the
nation in accordance with the law” can be realized. It is only then that the
people can be the masters of the nation and only then that the institutionalization
of the rule of law 法治化 throughout the nation and in all social life can be
promoted. In this way, the concept of party rule through law 依法执政 not only
requires the party to rule on the basis of the constitution, but it also requires that
the party rule itself on the basis of [internal] party regulations. (Fan, 2016: 10)
A constellation of ideas and relationships, linked by party leadership as the

common denominator, orbits yifa zhiguo as a tifa. To move from the Jiang-era
idea of yifa zhiguo as law-based governance, to the Xi-era idea of party-led
governance through law and virtuous party leadership, the party needed to
spell out explicitly how certain key ideological concepts are interlinked. These
concepts include the constitution, the people, the party’s leadership, rule by
moral virtue, and party rules and regulations, which now all play a leading role
in rule of law propaganda. Party theorists and propagandists now assert there
is a strong relationship between these concepts. Li Lin, head of jurisprudence
at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, asserts that the method of party
“rule in accordance with the law” 依法执政 and state “governing the nation in
accordance with the law” are closely integrated (Li, 2015). Socialist dialectics
have been reinvigorated to “integrate” 相结合 concepts and are now cast as an
important mechanism for understanding the relationship between key gover-
nance concepts. For instance, a March 20, 2017, article in the People’s Daily
claimed the importance of dialectical materialism in legal theory as a way to
create discursive unity between rule of law and “governing the nation using
moral virtue.” Here legal theorist Duan Haifeng asserts that the importance of
dialectical materialism to rule of law and to (party) rule by moral virtue is

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to provide strong intellectual support for the construction of the socialist rule of
law with Chinese characteristics. . . . Rule of law and rule by moral virtue are
important ways that the party governs. How should we correctly see the status
and function of the rule of law and the rule of virtue in the governance of our
party and government; how can we correctly handle the relationship between
the two? This requires the use of the dialectical thinking of dialectical
materialism. (Duan, 2017: 16)
Dialectical thinking as practiced by party propagandists and politico-legal

leaders in China today entails integrating concepts with each other to claim
that they are complementary. Asserting there is harmony between concepts
enables party theorists and propagandists to create a chain of thinking that
binds together and “organically unifies” 有机统一 what could otherwise be
taken as dissonant concepts or statements. The Supreme People’s Court
(SPC) has adopted this Xi-era take on the yifa zhiguo narrative with gusto. In
late 2016 and early 2017, deputy president and chief politico-legal reform
spokesperson Shen Deyong penned essays and made statements in a number
of outlets about the imperative of integrating socialist rule of law with another
tifa, “rule by moral virtue” (see Shen, 2017). Indeed, propaganda experts
have produced training manuals that emphasize the complementarity of rule
of law and rule by moral virtue. We see this narrative under construction in
the 2016 joint Ministry of Justice/Propaganda Department training text men-
tioned above. This text, distributed nationally to inform judicial officials and
party cadres of the explicit connections between party leadership and yifa
zhiguo, presents training manual section headings, sub-headings, and state-
ments such as these:
•• Yifa zhiguo is the mechanism that institutionalizes the status of the

party’s leadership.
•• Adhering to the party’s leadership is the main requirement of socialist
rule of law.
•• Yifa zhiguo is the main guarantee of the interests and happiness of the
people.
•• Party leadership is the essence of the concept of yifa zhiguo.
•• Party leadership and socialist rule of law are compatible concepts.
•• Socialist rule of law must uphold the leadership of the party and party
leadership must rely on socialist rule of law.
•• It is only through the leadership of the party that yifa zhiguo can be
realized.
•• It is only when yifa zhiguo is realized that the people can be “the mas-
ters of the nation” and only then that institutionalization of the rule of
law can be promoted.

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Trevaskes 359
•• The party rules the nation not only on the basis of the constitution but
also on the basis of internal party regulations.
•• Yifa zhiguo and “rule by moral virtue” must be integrated so that the
moral character [of those who lead] can bring to the fore the intrinsic
qualities of the law. (Fan, 2016: 10–12)
Fusing together relationships such as between the state constitution and

internal party regulations to portray them as functionally complementary
powers serves to further dispel any connotation that there exists a sharply
defined and clear separation between state and party power. Party theorists
now similarly stress the natural and organic compatibility of party leadership
with rule of law as an insight particular to the Xi era (Zhu, 2014). These types
of statements provide the foundation for the Xi leadership to assert further
organizational unity between, and stronger party leadership over, the key
areas of governance—namely legislative, judicial, security, and anti-corrup-
tion organs—that the party depends on for its survival. Xi Jinping himself has
on numerous occasions enthusiastically embraced the language of “integra-
tion” of party and state legal powers. For instance, in a speech marking the
ninety-fifth anniversary of the founding of the party on July 1, 2016, Xi
declared, “The core meaning of yifa zhiguo is that it organically unifies two
key concepts: ‘upholding the primacy of party leadership’ and ‘making the
people the masters of the nation’” (Sina News, 2016).
Relationships of linkage, integration, fusion, unification, and complemen-
tarity are all intrinsic to this narrative since its purpose is to cement within
party and people the idea of unity among those who govern and how they do
so. From here we explore the particularly important links between party lead-
ership and three of the concepts mentioned above: the constitution, the peo-
ple, and rule by moral virtue. We consider their relationship to each another
as articulated in party propaganda and in pronouncements made in the Xi
Jinping era to better understand how and why yifa zhiguo has been con-
structed as a party governance tifa, to anchor party leadership firmly at the
state helm in the Xi era.
Party Leadership as the Common Denominator in Building the

Yifa zhiguo Narrative
The use of many familiar Communist concepts for building the yifa zhiguo
narrative in the Xi Jinping era signals a continuity of messaging in the party’s
leadership across time, from the revolutionary era to the present day. But to
build this narrative with yifa zhiguo as a leading tifa, relationships between
and among concepts such as the party leadership, the people, the constitution,

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and rule by moral virtue have been adroitly repackaged. This is to accentuate
party leadership as their common denominator.
In Xi-era yifa zhiguo propaganda, the party’s leadership is essentially the
common thread linking the three key concepts of “the people,” “the constitu-
tion,” and rule by moral virtue to each other and to yifa zhiguo. Examination
of recent statements on law and governance and on power relationships and
responsibilities reveals that yifa zhiguo propaganda seeks to establish a new
set of norms that elevate party leadership above law and all other aspects of
governance. These norms are to embed into dominant discourses a new justi-
fication for the accentuated presence of leadership by the party to lay the
ground for further institutionalizing the party into government bodies and
functions with capacities such as the aforementioned new NSC. At the same
time, this propaganda spells out to the people and to the party how they
should behave in the context of these new power relations. For senior party
authorities, this is a set of norms on how to govern, and for the people and
junior party members, norms on how to be governed.
The constitution and “the people” have long had their place in party the-
ory, serving to legitimize the party’s right to rule (Wang, 2017). But in China
today, the constitution and the people as concepts have been given more
prominent discursive airtime, to reassert the Mao-era claim about ideological
unity between the party and these two main sources of its authority. Narrative
building in the Xi era has set out to make explicit the internal logic of the
relationship of each of these concepts to one another.
The People and the Constitution

After the party shut down the liberal constitutionalism debate in 2013, the
party’s propaganda machinery began to reassert its own version of party-
focused constitutionalism and the party’s importance as the representative of
the people, the masters of the nation.8 “The people” and “the constitution” are
keywords in most of Xi’s yifa zhiguo statements and speeches from 2014 to
2016. For instance, in an address to provincial cadres on February 3, 2015, Xi
declared that “law is the combined realization of the party’s key advocacy
and the people’s will” 法是党的主张和人民意愿的统一体现 (Xi, 2016b).
Most significantly, while the relationships between the constitution, the
people, and party leadership have not changed essentially in theoretical
terms, party leaders now draw attention to their claim that it is through party
leadership that state accountability and checks and balances operate effec-
tively. In fact, it is only through strong party leadership in and over state
agencies that these processes can be effected. This political logic builds on
the following precepts. Like the liberal theory of the rule of law, socialist rule

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Trevaskes 361
of law contends that the people are both the authors of the law and “the ulti-
mate justification for law” (Ding, 2017: 332). The claim here is that the law
is a manifestation of the people’s will. But in the Chinese socialist system, for
law to remain so requires the party’s leadership to represent the people at
each and every stage of the law’s operation from legislation through to all
aspects of enforcement, to maintain the political momentum for the law to be
observed properly (Ding, 2017: 324).
To further strengthen the post-2014 discursive blending of party and state
rule, party theorists and propagandists have accentuated the harmonious
unity of the party’s leadership with the interests of the people. This unity of
the people and the party legitimizes the party’s right to represent them.
Connecting the party and the people under the yifa zhiguo umbrella therefore
accentuates the idea that the party, as the vanguard of the people, must always
and forever remain present and supreme in all aspects of governance, since its
continuous presence “creates and sustains consensus” among the people
(Ding, 2017: 340–41). Only in asserting the collective will of the people in
action continuously in and through the law can the party sustain and continue
the momentum necessary to mobilize the people (341), thus enabling the
people to be the masters of the nation.
Since 2014, revival of discourse that references the importance of the party
as the people’s representative has served to circumvent and ultimately sup-
press any alternative rule of law debate and any alternative discussion about
protecting the people from abuse of power other than through the primacy of
party rule. In an essay in the party’s Seeking Truth magazine in January 2015,
the secretary-general of the CCP Central Political and Legal Affairs
Commission, Wang Yongqing, explained the importance of the people to the
construction of a distinctly Chinese socialist rule of law. He asserted that,
rather than passive recipients of the law, the people are the very entity that
formulates the law, implements it, and is its master. Wang argues that this is
possible only because the party represents the interests of the people in their
leadership of the country (Wang, 2015). Xi Jinping’s own 2015 essay on rule
of law in Seeking Truth expounded on the virtues of the party leadership’s
involvement in rule of law, explaining that such involvement would ensure
that an organic balance can be maintained between the leadership of the party,
the position of the people as masters of the country, and the rule of law. Only
when the rule of law is enforced strictly under the leadership of the CPC will
the people fully realize their role as masters of the country. (Xi, 2015)
After the Fourth Plenum decision of October 2014, official statements on

party leadership and yifa zhiguo increasingly voiced the long understood but

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rarely articulated claim that both the people and the preamble of the constitu-
tion are the two sources of authority that require the party to exercise leader-
ship over all governance agendas. In the words of a party theorist in 2016,
“the authority to rule the nation, given to the party through the constitution,
comes by representing the will and interests of the people.” This made clear
that the party has no interests of its own outside the interests of the people and
vice versa (Liu, 2016).
In 2014, activities began to highlight the importance of party centricity
and leadership in all aspects of governance to disseminate pufa jiaoyu propa-
ganda. Two five-year law dissemination and education campaigns, the last
two years of the sixth campaign (2014 and 2015), and the seventh campaign
from 2016 to 2020, promoted and continue to promote the importance of
respecting the preamble of the constitution, which the party leadership argues
gives it authority to lead in all aspects of governance (Wu, 2016). We also see
a refocus on the people in official party Propaganda Department texts. The
central message of the Xi era rule of law propaganda is that the party must of
necessity pursue a particular course of political action on the basis of what it
claims is in the interests of the people’s democratic dictatorship. This peo-
ple’s democratic dictatorship, as the theory goes, is the party’s fundamental
source of authority, as alluded to in the preamble of the constitution.
The role of rule of law propaganda work in helping to create an ideologi-
cal narrative-building context for the delivery of this new party-centric mes-
sage became evident in 2014, half way through the Sixth Five-Year Law
Dissemination and Education Campaign (Wu, 2014). In 2015, party authori-
ties in Beijing started imploring propaganda functionaries in the provinces to
use a variety of means to persuade the population to “worship the constitu-
tion” 崇拜宪法 and respect the law (Joint Notice, 2015). By late 2015, the
party’s Propaganda Department sought to cement the constitution-party rule
of law nexus by co-joining Constitution Day and Rule of Law Propaganda
Day. On November 20, 2015, the party’s Propaganda Department issued a
Joint Notice with the Ministry of Justice that was circulated from the Central
Committee in Beijing through party committees at all levels. As a way of
effecting the symbolic marriage between the constitution and party suprem-
acy, among a host of other initiatives, it announced that the party’s newly
minted December 4 Constitution Day and Rule of Law Propaganda Day
would now be celebrated simultaneously and that promotional activities to
celebrate the union would span an entire week (China Economic Net, 2015;
Joint Notice, 2015).
In 2015, all of the Propaganda Department’s pufa jiaoyu propaganda
themes were based on Xi Jinping’s yifa zhiguo, its connection with the con-
stitution, and the relationships of both to government agendas. Propaganda

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Trevaskes 363
announcements fused the constitution and the law with party supremacy by
incorporating various slogans that spanned across the political spectrum. The
joint Constitution and Rule of Law Propaganda Day in December 2015 was
multifaceted in its coverage of government slogans including “creating an
effective legal environment for the themes of innovation, openness, green-
ness, coordination, and inclusive development in the government’s Thirteenth
Five-Year Plan” (China Economic Net, 2015; Joint Notice, 2015). The con-
tent of these slogans was in marked contrast to that of previous law dissemi-
nation campaigns, which traditionally focused on educating the public about
law. This was the first time in three decades that law itself was not central to
a pufa jiaoyu law dissemination campaign.
For the first time in the history of pufa jiaoyu propaganda work, the 2015
Joint Notice placed the spotlight on government operations rather than on
legal reform itself. From this perspective, the latter part of the Sixth Five-
Year Law Dissemination and Education Campaign from 2013 could arguably
be classified not so much as a rule of law education campaign, but as a rule-
of-party supremacy awareness campaign. Its focus is not on law, but on the
leadership of the party in promoting Xi-era catchphrases such as the China
Dream, the Four Comprehensives and the New Normal, specific political
policies such as the One Belt One Road initiative, and political priorities such
as the importance of social stability in relation to petitioning, mediation, and
terrorism, and the importance of party discipline regulations (Wu, 2016).
How to Rule: Through Law and with Moral Virtue

After five years in power, the Xi administration announced at the Nineteenth
Party Congress in late 2017 that it had refocused the party’s leadership posi-
tion to incorporate into its governance repertoire a far-reaching supervisory
and monitoring mechanism to prevent corruption. It would accordingly mold
the behavior of all state employees, ranging from national legislators and
judges to school teachers and business people in state-owned enterprises,
through a new anti-corruption mechanism that combines party and state.
This new mega-structure mechanism, the NSC, is to monitor and inspect all
state civil servants across China to ensure they comply with the National Civil
Service Law, the Criminal Law, and any other relevant laws. Essentially, this
mechanism merges the anti-corruption structures of state and party, integrating
same-level party commissions for disciplinary inspection (CDI), government
corruption prevention agencies, and state prosecution offices that handle cases
of bribery and dereliction of duty (Xinhua News, 2017a; Yin, 2017). Through
the NSC, the party leadership core in Beijing has at its disposal a new structure
of power that it can use to supervise and monitor the activities of all state

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employees from the NPC down, party and non-party members alike. According
to Yang Xiaodu, deputy secretary of the party’s Central Commission for
Discipline Inspection (CCDI), the new mega-structure will “organically unify”
有机统一the party’s internal disciplinary and inspection mechanism with state
governmental supervision. Yang observed that in conceptual terms, the NSC
will “organically unify intra-party law with the idea of state governance of the
nation in accordance with the law” (Zhu and Qi, 2017).
The new NSC is the culmination of Xi’s efforts to rebuild party credibility
in the wake of the anti-corruption campaign. To pave the way for its estab-
lishment, in the years immediately prior to the establishment of the NSC,
China’s propaganda machine had made efforts to develop a more explicit link
between yifa zhiguo and “rule by moral virtue” (see Xinhua News, 2016a and
2016b; Sina News, 2017; Xi, 2016a and 2016b; Shen, 2017).9 Propaganda
presents the relationship between these two as a dialectical unity that essen-
tially asserts a claim about the behavior of leadership in governing the nation.
In Xi’s words, leading party cadres must “play a crucial role in governing the
country by law and virtue . . . to serve as examples in studying and observing
the law and in practicing virtue” (Xi, 2016a). Xi’s assertion is consistent with
the long-standing claim that the party is both the guardian and the authorita-
tive interpreter of morality in China. According to this logic, like their
Confucian predecessors, party leaders at all levels have a moral obligation to
decide what society’s moral values should be and must translate core values
“into policies and institutions capable of promoting popular well-being”
(Rosenzweig, 2017: 29). This is because, in contrast to Western-liberal under-
standings, party authorities’ notion of rule of law presupposes that law and
legal institutions are under party rule, a configuration of power that repre-
sents the “inherently moral state,” which functions to further political goals
(Rosenzweig, 2017: 32).
However, the 2014 Fourth Plenum decision goes further than merely men-
tioning the importance of rule by moral virtue: this decision is the first time a
party resolution has explicitly referred to the necessity of integrating rule by
moral virtue and yifa zhiguo. Promoting the complementary nature of rule of
law and rule by moral virtue constructs a dialectical unity that enables party
theorists to claim that the two ideas are integrated concepts, or what Duan
calls “mutually penetrable” (2017). According to Xi Jinping, the law is the
written embodiment of morality; the law “embodies the basic values of soci-
ety” and it “establishes clear moral guidance” (Dai, 2017). Xi Jinping exhorts
party members to “attach great importance to the role of moral education and
to improve socialist civilization.” Moreover, proper rule of law thinking 法治
思维 can be established only when combined with moral cognizance (Dai,
2017). Party, politico-legal system, and scholarly references to yifa zhiguo

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Trevaskes 365
since December 2016 (CPC News, 2016) have increasingly stressed the
importance of instilling moral virtue into the actual process of civil and crim-
inal procedures (see Shen, 2017; Fan, 2017). The Central Committee’s
“Opinions on Further Integrating Socialist Core Values into the Construction
of the Rule of Law,” issued in December 2016, calls for all party and govern-
ment organs to find various means to integrate socialist core values into their
routine operations (CPC News, 2016; Sina News, 2016). SPC vice president
Shen Deyong declared in April 2017 that the SPC had been hard at work
embedding core socialist values into the very fabric of the law through SPC
judicial interpretations, through case exemplars that illustrate good and bad
morals at play in civil and criminal cases, and through efforts to promote the
idea of procedural justice and “placing the trial hearing at the center of the
justice process” (Shen, 2017). Shen’s speech follows directly from the spirit
of a statement by Xi Jinping to justice system officials at the annual politico-
legal system conference in December 2016. There Xi asserted the absolute
imperative for justice system officials to integrate rule of law and rule by
virtue, and to model that virtue to the rest of society (Dai, 2017).
The imperative for cadres to fight corruption and not only to respect the
law but also to model lawful behavior is central to the rule by moral virtue
message. According to the Propaganda Department, the key target audience
of the current law dissemination and education campaign (2016–2020) is the
nation’s cadres (Five-Year Plan, 2016).10 On April 17, 2016, the Propaganda
Department and Ministry of Justice disseminated a detailed plan for the
Seventh Five-Year Plan for Rule of Law Propaganda and Education
Dissemination. The plan reveals the importance attached to promoting rule
by moral virtue and other concepts associated with anti-corruption as part of
the overall rule of law propaganda efforts. The plan declares that rule of law
self-cultivation 法治素养 is an important benchmark in weighing the work
performance of a cadre; whether a functionary is abiding by the law and
whether he or she handles matters “in accordance with the law” have become
important criteria for performance evaluation. According to Deputy Minister
of Justice Liu Zhenyu, the rule of law quality 法治素质 of individual polit-
ico-legal functionaries and their rule of law capacities 法治能力 are now key
performance indicators in their annual performance evaluations (Ministry of
Justice, 2016). This performance is measurable in part through the extent to
which they model propriety. Liu explains that for rule of law propaganda to
be effective, judges, prosecutors, administrative law enforcement officers,
and lawyers should model rule of law behavior through cases, administrative
law enforcement, dispute mediation, and routine delivery of legal services.
They should use cases—both positive and negative examples—to model how
rule of law should operate (Ministry of Justice, 2016).

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But why is it so important to claim that these concepts are mutually inte-
grated or “penetrable”? And why so at this particular juncture in PRC his-
tory? The answers lie in part in Xi Jinping’s stated key governance agendas,
which seek to deal with the problem of security and social instability in a way
distinctly different from the agendas of previous leaders including Jiang
Zemin and Hu Jintao. Xi’s move to further party-state integration is apparent
not only in the aforementioned new NSC but also in the 2015 PRC State
Security Law. Legal scholar Jianfu Chen observes that Article 44 of this law
provides the party’s own Central Commission on State Security with the
authority to coordinate the entire national security system. Article 63 gives
the Central Commission the power to orchestrate both state emergency mea-
sures and responses to national security crises. As Chen points out, “The
State Security Law thus, for the first time in post-Mao China, grants a party
authority state powers and allows such powers to be exercised directly by a
party authority—a practice that only existed during the Cultural Revolution
in the PRC” (Jianfu Chen, 2016: 200). In underscoring and accentuating
party centricity in all things politico-legal and security related (Xinhua News,
2014), the Xi leadership has refreshed political memories of Chinese social-
ism’s original claim about the role of central party authorities in representing
the people’s democratic dictatorship, and given the scourge of corruption, the
necessity for the party to centralize power in the hands of an elite group to
monitor and supervise party members and state functionaries alike.11 We see
this political logic in the justice and security system reforms since 2013 that
have recentralized party power (Anthony Li, 2016; Li Shuang, 2016). Hence,
the crux of the yifa zhiguo resurgence under Xi is not only to guarantee a
strong centralized party rule but also to effect party rejuvenation itself. In
short, this move is nothing less than a comprehensive strategy for party and
national rejuvenation.
Conclusion
Yifa zhiguo is a leading tifa in the current Xi era. Tifa are narrative hooks
upon which governance ideas in China hang; they are essential to understand-
ing the direction in which China’s party leadership seeks to move party and
nation. Tifa are used to send political signals about institutional or organiza-
tional change. Their use is therefore vital in preparing for change, often
through embedding and legitimizing a different or more nuanced understand-
ing of a well-established concept.
Yifa zhiguo propaganda in the Xi era has paved the way ideologically for
further integration of the Communist Party into the state. As Li Lin, head of
jurisprudence at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, explains, party

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Trevaskes 367
leadership through the rule of law “is not merely a jurisprudential issue but a
political one at heart. It is not merely theoretical but one that has direct rele-
vance to practice. . . . It comes down to the basic relationship between law
and politics” (Li, 2015). By “integrating” concepts such as “party leadership”
and “rule of law,” the Xi administration has been able to push through judi-
cial and legal reforms that restrain the capacity for abuse of power in local
areas. But the essential message is that the law—that is, legislative checks
and balances that provide accountability—is not of itself sufficient to stave
off the devastating effects of corruption. Law can be effective only through
strong and moral party leadership.
Yifa zhiguo rhetoric in Jiang Zemin’s time and throughout the Hu Jintao
era of the 2000s emphasized the notion of institutionalizing a socialist rule of
law through legislative reform. In the Xi era, however, a dimension has been
added to rule of law that takes it well beyond Jiang Zemin–era assertions. The
party’s 2014 Fourth Plenum decision asserts that the party’s leadership and
socialist rule of law are intimately compatible and that the party leads through
the conduit of governing the nation across all processes of the law (Zhu,
2014). This assertion translates into a new interpretation that, for rule of law
to be genuinely effective in China, it is not sufficient for it to be merely insti-
tutionalized through checks and balances in the correct legal channels.
Rather, party leadership must be manifest in and through the law at all stages
of its implementation. Party leadership “penetrated” into law serves to
“organically unify” concepts that could otherwise be interpreted as disaggre-
gated. Discursive unification reaffirms the party’s leadership over all pro-
cesses of governance and law—through the legal system, the constitution,
and the concept of rule by moral virtue—to position the party as the strong,
central core of a unified, stable nation, on track to reach its end goal of
national rejuvenation by the year 2049.
In the Xi era, the party leadership has decided that to achieve national
rejuvenation, liberalization of the legal system cannot be an option in any
form. It has therefore boldly taken the discursive space around rule of law, the
constitution, the people, and “rule by moral virtue” to recast how its gover-
nance tifa “governing the nation in accordance with the law” is talked about
and interpreted. Within this yifa zhiguo ideological echo chamber, the party
has redefined the parameters around which governance accountability is and
can be discussed. Yifa zhiguo discourse now asserts that those who rule by
moral virtue decide who and what is accountable to the law. Hence the cur-
rent official assertion to the effect that the laws designed to govern the nation
can be implemented and enforced only through a strong party presence in the
policy-making and implementation processes undertaken by key state agen-
cies (Sina News, 2016). In this sense, as Chen Jianfu (2016: 200) observes,

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the Xi leadership has come “out of the shadows.” As made clear through the
meanings embedded into yifa zhiguo as a central tifa of the current gover-
nance narrative, socialist rule of law in China (thin, thick, or otherwise) is not
the teleological end-game of nearly four decades of legal development, but
an ideology that works for perfecting clean and virtuous party rule to fulfill
its endgame of national and party rejuvenation.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica-
tion of this article.
Notes
1. In this article, for the Chinese term 法治 I use “rule of law” and not “rule by
law” since rule of law is the official Chinese translation used in most media and
propaganda outlets. As I use it here, the term does not have any connection to
what is understood by a liberal rule of law.
2. For a comprehensive outline of yifa zhiguo and socialist rule of law, see Albert
Chen, 2016. Also see Wang, 2010; and Zhu, 2010.
3. In Chinese, 法治宣传 refers to propaganda about the nature of the system as
opposed to a system of rule of man, whereas 法制宣传 refers to propaganda
specifically about new legislation 立法, developments in the justice system 司
法, or law enforcement 执法.
4. For a description of these administrative laws and rules, see Zhu, 2010, 106–8.
5. For a study on rule of law narrative-building in the Hu era, see Smith, 2018.
6. For a study of rule by virtue in this era, see Angle, 2012.
7. Leading legal experts in November 2017 noted the obvious conflict of authority
here. They pointed out that before the NSC law could pass the NPC in 2018, the
constitution itself would need to be amended to accommodate this new over-
riding power of the NSC. (See China’s leading procedural law experts Chen
Guangzhong and Chen Ruihua in wechat blog, http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/
uvFVZvsMoP8nxi5x6t3fsA.)
8. On the constitutionalism debate, see Creemers, 2015.
9. The term “ruling the nation using moral virtue” (“rule by virtue” in some transla-
tions) was first used in the Jiang Zemin era. Jiang even called for the integration
of “rule of law” and “rule by virtue,” but this idea of integration was not theoreti-
cally expounded upon in party statements until the current Xi era.
10. According to the April 2016 Five-Year Propaganda Plan issued jointly by the
Department of Propaganda and the Ministry of Justice, the two main targets for

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Trevaskes 369
the 2016–2020 rule of law propaganda campaign are China’s youth and China’s
public service (cadres) (see Five-Year Plan, 2016).
11. For a detailed theoretical explanation of Mao’s people’s democratic dictatorship,
see Knight, 2007.
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Author Biography
Susan Trevaskes is professor of Chinese Studies in the School of Humanities,
Languages and Social Sciences at Griffith University researching Chinese criminal
justice. She has published three sole-authored monographs on Chinese courts, polic-
ing, and the death penalty and has papers on Chinese justice in areas including crimi-
nal justice policy, justice reform, anti-crime campaigns, public security, stability
maintenance operations, state responses to drug crime, public punishment rituals, and
death penalty reform. Her latest books are co-edited volumes on The Politics of Law
and Stability in China (2014), Legal Reforms and Deprivation of Liberty in
Contemporary China (2016), and Justice: The China Experience (2017).

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Chinese Communist Party Leadership and Yifa Zhiguo in The Xi Era

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A Law Unto Itself

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Yifa zhiguo in the Xi Era

Yifa zhiguo 依法治国 is an imperative call to “govern the nation in accor-

1Griffith University, Nathan, Queensland, Australia

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intention of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to institute a comprehen-

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state anti-corruption agencies (Li, 2017). In important ways, this commis-

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The Yifa zhiguo Narrative in Party Propaganda

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establishes the principle of imbedding ‘governing the country in accordance

Yifa zhiguo and Propaganda Work

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Yifa zhiguo as a Tifa

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Link’s explanation provides useful insights for understanding both the

Reworking the Narrative to Defend the Idea of

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and Answers on the Seventh Five-Year Law Dissemination Campaign) was

Rule of law is the means of institutionalizing the status of the Chinese

A constellation of ideas and relationships, linked by party leadership as the

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Dialectical thinking as practiced by party propagandists and politico-legal

•• Yifa zhiguo is the mechanism that institutionalizes the status of the

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Fusing together relationships such as between the state constitution and

Party Leadership as the Common Denominator in Building the

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The People and the Constitution

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After the Fourth Plenum decision of October 2014, official statements on

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How to Rule: Through Law and with Moral Virtue

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