Introduction

This chapter continues the analysis of the conservative socialist ideological position and its relationship to liberal legal thought. The chapter's specific aim is to demonstrate that paradoxical and otherwise implausible statements about the rule of law may be both constitutive of and useful for an ideological project. As the starting point of this argument, this chapter seeks to reassess the perception that the Chinese leadership approaches law in an instrumentalist manner. By instrumentalism most students of China do not refer to the adjudicative theory according to which law is a means to an end. This kind of instrumentalism was, of course, central to the development of twentieth-century legal thought. “Law as a means to end” connoted the proposition that the empirical analysis of society should influence the legal ought. In China, the approach has been popularized by Zhu Suli's neoconservative legal thought, which seeks to justify a pragmatist approach to adjudication in China. In contrast to this adjudicative theory of instrumentalism, in foreign studies of Chinese law instrumentalism generally refers to those ideological conceptions that concern the relationships between the legal system and other parts of society rather than the form of legal thought within the legal system. In this sense, instrumentalism signifies an ideological conception that regards legal norms and processes not as the final arbiters of social choices, but as tools to implement decisions that emerge from other, supposedly more legitimate sources of normativity, such as the decision-making processes within the Communist Party.