China's Embattled "Rule of Law": Paradoxes and the Breakthrough under Single Party Dominance

China's thirty years of economic development has brought on a number of crippling problems: high inequality, unbalanced development, environmental degradation and so forth. Arguably all of them coincide with China's long-enduring absence of a full-fledged legal system that could balance state power and human rights, in another word, the "rule of law". Looking into reform advancement and regression of China's legal development, this thesis argues that a "rule of law" regime as proposed by Pan Wei would either fail to come into being, or will not do the job, without constitutional and legislative reform. This thesis argues that China's centuries-old civic project is one focusing on building constitutionalism, and a Chinese Socialist Constitutional State conducive to Socialist democracy as proposed in the thesis would better reconcile the needs of the Party and society at this critical juncture, as well as in the long run.M.A