INTRODUCTION

As early as December 1978, the monumental economic reform started, accompanied by the significant progress of rebuilding a credible set of laws and legal institutions in mainland China, especially in formalizing its civil justice system. The past three decades of reform and opening up have witnessed the Chinese judicial system reform following the basic path from reconstruction of the judicature to reform of Trial Modes and then to reform of the judicial system. China's program of legal construction has grown at an even greater rate as China entered the World Trade Organization, whose membership is contingent on greater transparency in the lawmaking process, more effective and formal procedures for challenging administrative action and greater judicial independence.

The Chinese tradition of pursuing objective or individualized justice has created a de facto limit on the lawmaking power of the courts. One of the fundamental tasks of civil procedure is to ensure the courts establish the truth based on fact. To achieve this end, Chinese law allows judges to play a more active role in adjudication than the US Federal Court System permits. The courts view their role as applying the law to resolve private disputes rather than issuing normative decisions to settle difficult social questions. Until now, the judicial reform has enriched Chinese legal culture with a new ingredient, including expanding judicial openness, enhancing judicial democracy, standardizing judicial acts, etc. It is a natural trend of the civil judicial reform to introduce some mechanisms into the procedure, which is becoming a prominent measure in the dispute resolution system, including playing down the judge's involvement in the trail, strengthening the people's assessor's work, establishing small claim procedures, public interest lawsuits, improving online disclosure of civil judgment and reinforcing the burden of proof system.

In recent years, Chinese courts, with a mandate from the Supreme People's Court, have implemented a variety of reforms in the civil litigation system and passed several revisions of the Civil Procedure Law. China promulgated the Civil Procedure Law in 1982, which was replaced by the Civil Procedure Law of the People's Republic of China (CPL) in 1991.