Efforts at legal reform in China under the banner of the socialist legal system (shehui zhuyi fazhi) represent an attempt by the post-Mao regime to rest legitimacy in part on an ideology of formal law that complements the regime's efforts at economic reform. While the Party has not abandoned its reliance on the conceit that it represents the forces of historical revolution, the establishment of the socialist legal system is aimed to some extent at addressing a more immediate challenge of retaining legitimacy in the eyes of a populace for whom abstract notions of historical determinacy have little meaning. Proponents of reform have linked these abstract and practical aspects of legitimacy by asserting that legal reform is a requirement of the specific stage of historical development in which China now finds itself.

In the past, the loyalty most Chinese people's congress deputies felt toward the state completely overwhelmed their sense of responsibility to constituents. Deputies in the Maoist era faced simple and clear expectations to represent the regime to the people and often devastating sanctions if they did not. Ambiguities were few and deputies had limited opportunities to define their own role or to expand their constituency focus. More recently, however, evolving expectations, rapid societal change and institutional reforms have transformed the duties of “people's representatives” and have created deputy identities that are increasingly multi-layered and fraught with contradictions. Deputies now have unprecedented opportunities to improvise on conventional scripts and some have taken on new roles: roles that clash with their traditional responsibilities, and that appear very difficult to reconcile.

This article examines the organizational evolution of Communist Party control over lawmaking processes and institutions in post-Mao China. In particular, it charts the erosion and decentralization of Party control which has accompanied the rise of lawmaking since 1978. The unity of Party control over lawmaking has frayed and dissipated dramatically in these years, as more and more important policy issues are resolved outside the arena of the Party's central decision-making organs (such as the Politburo, the Secretariat, and so on). This decentralization has been matched by a corresponding increase in the institutional power, autonomy and assertiveness of the government (executive) lawmaking offices, and other more open policy-making arenas, most notably the National People's Congress, but also including the Supreme People's Court.

This yellow river, it so happens, bred a nation identified by its yellow skin pigment. Moreover, this nation also refers to its earliest ancestor as the Yellow Emperor. Today, on the face of the earth, of every five human beings there is one that is a descendant of the Yellow Emperor.

Expressions of anti-black sentiment by Chinese students have caught the world's attention periodically since the end of the 1970s. Demonstrations against African students in Nanjing and other cities between late 1988 and early 1989 received wide press coverage. Because the African population in China is small and transient, some observers saw these events as a manifestation of a vestigial xenophobia, not as part of a developing trend of thought within a key segment of Chinese society. Placed next to the brutal ethnic conflicts that plague much of the world, the episodic, non-lethal incidents in China seemed evanescent, with only fleeting implications for China's foreign policy.

The 1988–89 Nanjing Anti-African protests, exposing a high degree of student discontent towards the Chinese political system four months before the spring 1989 pro-democracy movement, exhibited a complex interaction between Chinese nationalism and efforts to promote political reforms. Nanjing students fused together racist strains in Chinese culture, their perception of themselves as the embodiment of Chinese patriotism and their support for legal and democratic political reforms as they took to the streets to protest against the government's inadequate handling of the alleged murder of a Chinese by an African student.

In the aftermath of their suppression of the democracy movement in June 1989, China's leaders concluded that the Chinese Communist Party's leadership selection system was in serious trouble. The actions of intellectuals and the media during the May-June crisis, measures proposed by former Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang for cadre reform and the results of an earlier decision to decentralize the nomenklatura convinced authorities in Beijing that Party control of leadership selection had decayed and that decentralization of personnel decisions had gone too far. During the next few years China's post-4 June leadership took steps to rectify these problems. One of these was to revise the central Party's nomenklatura, which they subsequently re-issued in 1990.

The arrest in Shanghai of Hilaire Noulens and his “wife” (their real names were Yakov Rudnik and Tatyana Moiseenko, see below), members of the Communist International's (Comintern) apparat in East Asia, the seizure of a cache of documents concerning the Far Eastern Bureau (FEB) of the Comintern and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the subsequent trial of the Noulens by the Chinese authorities, and the interest taken in the case by numerous Communist-led organizations and fellow-travelling intellectuals was a cause célèbre in the early 1930s, in the foreign community in China as well as in Europe and North America. Despite having been compared to the notorious Sacco-Vanzetti case, and having been nearly as spectacular and important as the 1927 raid on the Soviet Embassy in Peking, the Noulens Affair as a whole has not been the subject of any reliable study.