A Study On The Letters And Visits System In The Vision Of Constitution

The Letters and Visits system is a native Chinese system. To satisfy the needs of specialideology and country management since the foundation of New China, the executives haveestablished some supporting organizations and set up a series of modes of system, and finallyhave completed the construction of China’s contemporary Letters and Visits system afterseveral changes. It is proved, however, that in China’s state system the attitude to the Lettersand Visits system is ambivalent: it implicates Chinese traditional political culture on one handand seemingly goes against the modern democracy and legality on the other; besides, it bothmeets the requirements of the public’s right relief and seemingly damages the judicialauthority. Therefore, whether the Letters and Visits system has to be abolished has been amajor historic subject confronting modern China. Based on personal interest, the writer haschosen the Letters and Visits system as the subject of his master’s thesis, hopefully to slightlycontribute to the reformation and legal construction of this system through the superficialthinking described in this paper.The whole paper is divided into five chapters as defined below:The first chapter is a study of the basic theory of the Letters and Visits system. Exceptfor the definition, the characters and the institution, the structure of the system issystematically described by specially used ordinary analysis method, which is followed by thewriter’s personal view on the position of this system in the Chinese Constitution.The second chapter emphasizes on the development of China’s Letters and Visits systemsince the foundation of New China and the comparative study between this system and thesimilar petition systems in foreign countries. At the very beginning of this chapter, the writeraffirms the existence of the Letters and Visits system in ancient China. Besides this, two partsare stated in this chapter. The first part introduces the periods of development of the Lettersand Visits system since the foundation of New China and the second part introduces andanalyzes the similar systems in several other countries.The analysis of the current situation and the outstanding problems regarding the Lettersand Visits system is in the third chapter. In this chapter, the current situation of the settings ofinstitution, the terms of configuration and the working mechanism of the Letters and Visitssystem are introduced. On the basis of this, the outstanding problems of this system are analyzed: poor institutional mechanism, inadequate legislation, litigation petition, unsoundsystem of responsibility and so on.The fourth chapter is an introduction of the debate regarding the issue of whether theLetters and Visits system should be abolished, which followed by the writer’s personaljudgment on the debate. The writer starts with introducing the controversy among theoristsconcerning the issue of “weakening” or “enhancing” the Letters and Visits system and thenconcludes that the Letters and Visits system should be reformed rather than abolished fromthe discussion of the feasibility and necessity of this system.The fifth chapter is the writer’s thinking about the reconstruction of the Letters and Visitssystem, which is divided into three stages. In the first stage, a people’s congresses unifiedLetters and Visits system is needed to be built. After analyzing the rationality of the people’scongresses unified Letters and Visits system, the writer makes two recommendations: theformulation of a petition Law and the establishment of a committee. The goal of the secondstage is to advance the independence of the judiciary and to establish judicial authority. Thewriter analyzes the importance of the judicial independence and authority in China andproposes to the establishment of judicial authority. The goal in the third stage is to establishChina’s Letters and Visits petition system. The writer analyzes the similarities and differencesbetween the Letters and Visits system and petition system and envisaged the establishment ofChina-character petition system.