Jennifer Altehenger's fine book details government efforts to popularize law in the People's Republic of China between 1949 and 1989. Using a rich array of archival sources, she explores the contours of state-directed popular legal education and its role in furthering the PRC regime's policy goals. Altehenger shows how, over the first 40 years of its rule, the PRC Party-state deployed methods of propaganda in popularizing law to advance the regime's authority over political transformation and socio-economic development. This terrific book makes a significant contribution to the understanding of propaganda in China as well as to the fields of law, politics and history of the PRC.
Altehenger's Introduction explores the dilemmas facing the revolutionary PRC government trying to encode its rule through law in a society where formal legal texts and institutions were not prominent. Altehenger shows how, facing considerable diversity and scepticism in popular and specialist views about law on land reform, judicial reform and marriage law, the regime deployed its political propaganda apparatus to build uniformity in public understanding. Altehenger examines specific practices of propaganda in the context of the 1950 Marriage Law and the 1954 Constitution, revealing how regime perspectives on law as an instrument of political authority impelled efforts to maintain control over legal interpretation and dissemination. Turning to the post-Mao period, Altehenger focuses on popularization efforts around the 1982 Constitution aimed at changing popular consciousness about governance, safety and security, while portraying the development of the first five-year plan for building public legal knowledge as an exemplar for the regime's popularization efforts in the face of ongoing challenges. Altehenger's Conclusion summarizes the essentially political character of the PRC regime's law popularization efforts in historical and comparative context, while reviewing the political challenges that emerged and questioning what if anything is uniquely “socialist” about China's legal system.
Altehenger's insightful portrayal illuminates several dilemmas attendant to popularization of law in China. The first involves the challenge of building social consensus about the role of law in authoritarian governance generally. Altehenger notes that during popularization efforts around the 1954 Constitution, for example, responses to regime-sponsored surveys often questioned the relevance and effectiveness of formal law in regulating China's revolutionary society. Social consensus on the role of law remained elusive during the post-Mao period as well, as debates over the 1982 Constitution's deletion of the right to strike and the “Four Big Freedoms” (to speak freely, air views fully, hold great debates, and put up big character posters) reflected contradictions in public understanding between law's putative role as a source of rights and its support for the authority of the Party-state.
A second dilemma highlighted by Altehenger's study involves the elusiveness of consistent interpretation on particular laws. As Altehenger shows, despite vigorous efforts to control the channels for popularizing law through publication of texts and commentary, the Party-state was often unable to prevent unorthodox and even “incorrect” (by regime standards) interpretations of the 1950 Marriage Law, for example. During the post-Mao period as well, Altehenger depicts how the “Five Year Plan for the Popularization of Common Legal Knowledge” (1986–1990) was aimed to resolve broad inconsistencies in popular understanding of particular laws, but was only partially successful despite the regime's near monopoly over legal publications and other channels for public education.
Finally, Altehenger points to a fundamental contradiction faced by China's authoritarian Party-state seeking to promote its policies through legal propaganda, namely that in popularizing law the regime cedes an important degree of autonomy to popular thought about law and policy and by extension about the Party-state itself. During the 1950s, as Altehenger shows, the Party-state was often unable to assert effective control over popular expectations about law despite the propaganda resources at the regime's disposal. During the post-Mao period, regime efforts to maintain political control often ran counter to popular expectations about law and legal process, in the context of Democracy Wall in 1978–79 and later at Tiananmen in 1989.
Altehenger's analysis contributes mightily to our understanding of the period that she examines, but also is useful in appreciating the dilemmas of law in China today. As Altehenger's study shows, the PRC regime has historically viewed law as an instrument of rule, not a restraint on the power of the Party-state. This view was evident once again at the 4th Plenum of the 18th National CPC Congress in 2014, which confirmed that law in the PRC today serves primarily if not exclusively as a mechanism for preserving Party-state power. As China continues to devote propaganda resources to popularizing legal knowledge, one may only hope that as the regime continues to limit law's role to preserving the authority of the Party-state, the diversity of opinions about law that Altehenger documents continues.
