Law and Justice under Mao Zedong
The Abolition of the KMT Legal System
The founding of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, initiated a radical break with the legal past. The Directive on the Abolition of the Six Codes and the Establishment of Judicial Principles, issued by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee in February 1949, formally abrogated the entire legal system of the Republic of China — the Six Codes that had been the foundation of Republican law. The Directive declared that the Kuomintang’s “reactionary law” was a tool of class oppression and had no place in the new China.
The Common Programme of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, adopted on September 29, 1949, served as the provisional constitution of the new state. The Common Programme established the basic principles of the new legal order: the state was a “people’s democratic dictatorship” led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants; it protected the rights of the people while suppressing the “reactionary classes”; and it would gradually establish a unified legal system to replace the abolished KMT codes.
The practical consequence of the abolition of the KMT codes was that China had no formal legal system. Courts were instructed to apply “policies, laws, and decrees of the new democracy” and to be guided by “the principles of the Common Programme and the policies and laws of the people’s government.” In practice, this meant that judges — many of whom were former army officers and Party cadres with no legal training — decided cases according to Party policy and their understanding of revolutionary justice. The gap between formal law and actual practice, which would characterise the entire Mao period, was present from the beginning.
The Marriage Law of 1950
The Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China, promulgated on May 1, 1950, was the first major piece of legislation enacted by the new government and one of its most significant legal achievements. The Law was a radical instrument of social transformation that sought to overthrow the traditional Chinese family system — the “feudal” patriarchal family structure that had been the foundation of Chinese social order for two millennia.
The Marriage Law abolished the traditional arranged marriage system, under which marriages were contracted by families for social and economic reasons without the consent of the parties. Article 1 declared: “The arbitrary and compulsory feudal marriage system, which is based on the superiority of man over woman and which ignores the children’s interests, is abolished.” Article 2 established the principle of free choice of partners: “Bigamy, concubinage, child betrothal, interference in the remarriage of widows, and the exaction of money or gifts in connection with marriages are prohibited.” The Law established monogamy as the only legal form of marriage, set minimum marriage ages (20 for men, 18 for women), required both parties to register the marriage voluntarily with the government, and recognised the right to divorce — a provision that enabled hundreds of thousands of women to escape abusive marriages.
The implementation of the Marriage Law was uneven. In urban areas, where the Party’s administrative capacity was strongest, the Law was enforced relatively effectively. In rural areas, where traditional family structures remained powerful, implementation was resisted. Local cadres, many of whom shared traditional attitudes about gender roles, were reluctant to enforce provisions that conflicted with local custom. The Law nevertheless had a transformative effect: by 1953, approximately 6.5 million divorces had been granted, and the traditional arranged marriage system had been substantially undermined in areas of effective Party control.
The 1954 Constitution
The Constitution of the People’s Republic of China, adopted on September 20, 1954, by the First National People’s Congress, was the first formal constitution of the PRC and the foundation of the socialist legal system. The Constitution established the basic structure of the state: the National People’s Congress (NPC) as the highest organ of state power, the State Council as the executive, the Supreme People’s Court as the highest judicial organ, and the Supreme People’s Procuratorate as the legal supervisory organ responsible for ensuring the uniform enforcement of law.
The 1954 Constitution declared that “all citizens are equal before the law” (Article 85) and guaranteed a range of fundamental rights — freedom of speech, press, assembly, association, and religion (Articles 87–88), inviolability of person (Article 89), freedom of residence and movement (Article 90), and the right to work, education, and social security (Articles 91–94). The Constitution also provided for the independence of the judiciary: Article 78 declared that “the people’s courts administer justice independently, subject only to the law.”
The Constitution’s adoption inaugurated a brief period of legal institutionalisation known as the “golden age of law” (1954–1957). During this period, the first formal legal institutions were established: the Supreme People’s Court issued regulations on court procedure, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate began to exercise its supervisory functions, the Ministry of Justice organised the training of judges and prosecutors, and the first regulations on lawyers and notaries were adopted. The Chinese Political Science and Law Association was established in 1953, and law schools began to produce the first generation of socialist jurists.
The period 1954–1957 also saw the drafting of the first PRC criminal code, criminal procedure code, and civil code — draft legislation that would have established a comprehensive legal framework. These drafts, however, were never enacted. The Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 ended the “golden age” and reversed the process of legal institutionalisation.
The Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Reversal of Legal Development
The Anti-Rightist Campaign (1957–1959) was a devastating blow to the development of Chinese law. The campaign was launched in response to the Hundred Flowers Movement (1956–1957), during which Mao Zedong had invited criticism of the Party’s policies. Legal professionals — judges, prosecutors, lawyers, and legal scholars — had been among the most outspoken critics, advocating for the rule of law, judicial independence, and protection of individual rights against Party authority.
The response was swift and brutal. Prominent legal figures including Qian Duansheng, Wang Tieya, and Han Youquan were denounced as “rightists,” removed from their positions, and subjected to persecution and re-education. Law schools were purged of “reactionary academic authorities,” the study of law was reduced to the study of Party policy, and the legal profession was delegitimised. The Ministry of Justice was abolished in 1959, its functions transferred to the Supreme People’s Court and the Ministry of Public Security. The procuracy was subordinated to the Party, and its supervisory functions were restricted.
The campaign’s effect on the legal system was catastrophic. The formal legal institutions that had been developed between 1954 and 1957 were dismantled. The drafting of codes was abandoned. The principle of judicial independence was repudiated as “bourgeois formalism.” The courts were subordinated to the Party committees, and judges were instructed to apply Party policy rather than law. The legal profession — the lawyers, notaries, and legal scholars who had begun to build a socialist legal system — was destroyed.
The Cultural Revolution and Legal Collapse
The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) brought the complete destruction of what remained of China’s legal system. The campaign, launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 to purge “revisionist” elements from the Party and to reassert revolutionary ideology, targeted all formal institutions — including the courts, the procuracy, and the legal profession — as “bourgeois” and “counter-revolutionary.”
The Supreme People’s Procuratorate was abolished in 1968. The courts were taken over by revolutionary committees (geming weiyuanhui) composed of Party cadres, military representatives, and “mass representatives” — a fusion of judicial, administrative, and legislative functions that eliminated any semblance of judicial independence. The Supreme People’s Court was reduced to a section of the Ministry of Public Security. The Beijing Law School of Peking University — the leading centre of legal education in China — was closed in 1966, its faculty purged, and its library dispersed.
The formal legal system was replaced by “mass justice” — an extralegal system of struggle sessions, mass criticism, and revolutionary courts. The Public Security Bureau operated without legal constraints, arresting, detaining, and punishing individuals on the basis of political denunciation rather than legal process. The “mass line” approach to justice, which had its origins in the Yan’an period, reached its extreme form: law was whatever served the revolutionary struggle, and the Party’s authority was unlimited.
The consequences were catastrophic. Between 1966 and 1976, millions of persons were persecuted, imprisoned, or killed without legal process. The legal profession was eliminated: there were no practising lawyers in China, no legal education, no published legal codes, and no functioning judicial institutions. The only law was the shifting policy directives of the Party, enforced through the Public Security Bureau and the revolutionary committees. The Cultural Revolution represented the triumph of legal nihilism — the complete rejection of law as a method of social organisation — and it left a deep and lasting scar on Chinese legal development.
Mass Line Justice and Revolutionary Committees
The “mass line” (qunzhong luxian) approach to justice was the guiding ideology of Mao-era legal practice. The mass line held that justice should be participatory, substantive, and politically informed — that formal legal procedures were bourgeois obstacles to revolutionary justice. The Ma Xiwu adjudication method — named after the president of the Supreme Court of the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region during the Yan’an period — exemplified this approach. Ma Xiwu went into villages to hear cases on the spot, investigated facts directly, consulted with local Party cadres, and educated the masses through adjudication.
The revolutionary committees that governed China during the Cultural Revolution operated as the institutional expression of mass line justice. The committees combined legislative, executive, and judicial functions in a single body, rejecting the “bourgeois” separation of powers. They were composed of representatives of the masses, the military, and the Party, and they applied “revolutionary principles” rather than formal law. Disputes were resolved through investigation, education, and mediation rather than through adversarial proceedings. The substantive outcome — the correct result from the perspective of revolutionary justice — was more important than procedural regularity.
The Marriage Law of 1950: A Second Look
The Mao-era legal system presents a fundamental paradox. On one hand, the Marriage Law of 1950, the 1954 Constitution, and the brief period of legal institutionalisation (1954–1957) represented genuine achievements: they established the principles of gender equality, mass participation, and social transformation through law. The Marriage Law, in particular, contributed to the liberation of women from traditional patriarchal structures and established the legal foundation for gender equality that continues to inform Chinese family law.
On the other hand, the Mao period as a whole was characterised by the subordination of law to politics — the consistent prioritisation of Party authority over legal rules, revolutionary objectives over procedural regularity, and mass justice over formal legality. The Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution demonstrated that the legal system had no autonomy from the Party and that legal professionals could be purged when they asserted the independence of law.
The Mao-era legal legacy is thus deeply ambiguous: an early commitment to legal institutionalisation that was reversed by the Party’s insistence on its own supremacy; a Marriage Law that transformed gender relations but was enforced only as long as it served Party objectives; and a decade of legal nihilism that left China without any functioning legal system. The post-Mao legal reconstruction that began after 1978 was in large part a reaction against this legacy — an attempt to build a legal system that could provide stability, predictability, and constraint on arbitrary power, within the continuing framework of Party authority.