Political-Legal Logic Of Rule-by-Law In Rural China

Basing on the field survey to Qinyao People's Tribunal in Guanzhong Area, Shaanxi Province, the dissertation systematically investigates the position and unique function of people's tribunal in contemporary rural China governance, furthermore, discloses the internal relation between rural governance and political-legal tradition.Since 1990, the national governance mode has transformed to"governance through laws"from"governance basing on policy"; accordingly, the effect of people's tribunal has gradually increased and its special governance logic has been emphasized; judiciary power and administrative power has been differentiated carefully and chaotic phenomena in rural governance have been clarified. By strengthening construction of people's tribunal, our country encourages the court to exert judicial power independently in order to solve conflicts and disputes in village, and thus increases legitimacy in social governance and tries to further consolidate the ruling foundation of the party-state. The dissertation bases on the macroscopic historical survey to people's tribunal and on field survey to judiciary operation process of Qinyao People's Tribunal, People's Court of Gudu District, Weishui City, and discloses that political-legal tradition of new China has decisive effect on objectives and means of rural governance, by analyzing the changes of governance function of people's tribunal.The dissertation explores the social environment and system restriction of rural governance from the angle of people's tribunal, emphatically investigates law viewpoint of villagers and function of village elitists in village rule by law, inspects the origin and performance of implementing specially invited coordinator in Qinyao People's Tribunal and then discloses the internal intension and mutual regulation between superincumbent generality and local-color strategy from bottom to top.The dissertation also depicts the judiciary operation logic of people's tribunal from the point of party-state, points out that the overall job objective of people's tribunal has changed quietly from"the people's judiciary"in the past to"judiciary for the people"nowadays since 1990, and the substance of the change is that party-state wants to strengthen the legitimate basis of its state governance through the legitimate operation of court section-system. However, because the hard constraint of resource and soft constraint of law coexist, the grass-root tribunal (people's tribunal), which is one of the governance organizations, and its deputy (court police) abide by a set of political economics logic of maximum self-interest, while this set of logic is not in conformity with the political demand of party-state sometimes; as a result, the contradiction not only offsets the effort of party-state to strive for legitimacy in a certain extent, but also forms potential hindrance for the improvement of state governance capacity. The dissertation indicates that the contemporary Chinese village rule by law follows a set of"political-legal"logic but not judiciary logic in fact. Under the established constitutionalism framework of party-state, the rational and programmed governance form could not really trigger the essential transformation of governance logic, thus it is the so-called"old wine in a new bottle".