The Existing Constitutional Amendment Study

As far as amendments to Chinese constitutional law are concerned, there are some problems nowadays including too high frequency of modification, too many amending clauses, more defects than benefits resulted from the fact that the central committee of CPC often raises suggestion to constitutional amendment, failure to abide by the principle that we shall not revise when the law is not necessary to amend and serious incompleteness of rectifying procedure, etc. In the first place, after specifically analyzing those problems we can find some shortcomings in current constitutional law from the perspective of modifying process.Constitutional law aims at protecting individual basic rights from infringement by state organs, which is an intrinsic quality of constitutional law. This essence determines that constitutional law could only enact regulations of certain aspects and it cannot and should not cover all areas. As an essential covenant of the whole society, it is not an ordinary law and shall not prescribe specific liabilities of citizens. Different from national policy, it shall not stipulate details of economical system. Other than political guiding principle, it shall not provide too many regulations like creed. In the second place, we can also find more inadequateness in current constitutional law when we inspect and observe essential attribution of constitutionalism. As we know, constitutionalism has some basic values, comprising complete guarantee of human rights, reasonable arrangement of powers, rigorous safeguard of social order, efficient coordination of interests and so on. However, human rights maintenance value undoubtedly lies in the core of the system of basic values while the latter three values, which could be regarded as technical instruments implemented to safeguard human rights, only stand subordinately or inferiorly.At the same time, there are still some provisions to be deliberated as far as the preface and the part of national flag, national anthem, national emblem and capital in chapter four of current constitutional law. In a word, a standard constitutional law should only include those regulations about individual basic rights and state power structure. By specifically analyzing intrinsic quality, basic values and current amendment status of constitutional law, we can find that Chinese current constitutional law still has some defects and insufficiencies. In previous four amendments, we did not make outstanding breakthrough in such important areas as central value and enforcement safeguarding of constitutional law. Therefore, explicitly promulgating its central value, prominently reflecting its essential function and fully guaranteeing its specific enforcement shall be basic tendency of constitutional amendment in the next step. In order to reconstruct constitutional law, the writer will, in the last part, bring forward some suggestion upon establishing new constitutional soul, founding new constitutional system, two specific steps to be taken recently and so on.