The chapter provides an overview of the legal history of live witness testimony in China, tracing the role of witnesses in the criminal courts from the late 1970s until the present day, while also introducing the current legislation on witnesses and testimony and discussing in detail the reforms within the 2012 Criminal Procedure Law encouraging witnesses to take the stand. It then explores the reasons for the failure of all live witness testimony-oriented reforms to date, with the author sharing her empirical findings from a pilot project and analysing the reasons for the low rate of witness attendance in practice. She also makes the key argument that the success of witness reform in China ultimately depends on the introduction of cross-examination rules. The chapter then puts forward a number of proposals for further witness reform in China, including the short-term goal of making the current reforms more effective and the long-term goal of adopting hearsay.

The introduction mirrors the volume’s overall structure. It begins with a review of the literature on post-2013 legal institutional reforms before turning to the context and content of procedural law changes and court reforms. The chapter then discusses the role of the Supreme People’s Court as an initiator of criminal procedure amendments and promoter of legal institutional reform. The most significant change in the judicial structure, which is caused by the introduction of the supervision commissions, is examined from the perspective of ongoing court reforms and the balance of power amongst the various actors within the judiciary. The introduction then turns to the criminal procedure law reforms enacted in 2012 and 2018, discussing the new mechanism of pretrial detention, the criminal justice reform goal of ‘trial-centredness’ and criminal reconciliation in public prosecution cases. As the contextual factors of criminal trials often have a decisive impact on the trial outcome, such factors as performance evaluations of courts and judges and media scrutiny of criminal cases are subsequently analysed. It concludes with a summary of the key issues and findings of the volume as a whole.

Drawing on research into the substance of and process by which the Supreme People’s Court drafts judicial interpretations in the area of criminal procedure law, this chapter argues that the drafting process proceeds in a ‘gated community’ of representatives from the relevant authorities. The process creates legal rules that are politically acceptable, legally sound and practicable in the Chinese legal environment. The drafting reflects the quasi-administrative way in which the Supreme People’s Court operates: professional yet politically attuned. Although discrete efforts are being made to strengthen human rights protections and procedural protections (e.g. increasing ‘trial-centred procedures’) in the course of criminal procedure reforms, those efforts will be restricted to the confines of what is permitted by the political authorities.