Abstract
The launch of economic reforms and the subsequent explosion of legislation have inevitably changed the way in which state and society relate in contemporary China. Before reforms began, people were fixed in their work units or villages, through the strict enforcement of the household registration or hukou system. The patron-client relation, or the instrumental personal ties between individuals and low-level officials within work units, played an important role in maintaining social control. Since reforms began, however, the state has offered more and more space to society, in order to stimulate the market economy. As a result, it has sought to govern and control society through use of legal rules. An unavoidable question, therefore, is how does the state bring these legal rules into play? One of the major themes of related literature is that law is not a limit on the state, but instead an instrument by which political power is exercised and protected. While these studies offer a general picture of the role of law in China, they are inadequate in that most of them look principally at formal legal institutions and conduct doctrinal analysis using Western legal concepts. Due to the limitations of this approach, they cannot answer how exactly law operates in real life; specifically, they do not address the role of law in balancing economic development and political stability, especially when the two conflict; nor do they address the effect of law on pre-existing hierarchical social classifications. Moreover, the emphasis of the instrumental use of law often assumes or implies that the state is able to achieve its goals via the mechanism of law, while legal realists and legal sociologists often remind us of the indeterminacy and unintended consequences of legal enforcement. These studies, carried out largely through doctrinal analysis of legal texts, thus are quite likely to neglect the complexity of legal enforcement in the real world.