Understanding the Evolving Relationship between the Party and the Law: The Case of China’s National Supervision Commission

Abstract

This article uses the National Supervision Commission (NSC) as a case study to examine the evolving relationship between the Chinese Communist Party (the Party) and the law. There are three ways to conceptualize the Party’s dominance over the law in China’s constitutional discourses. Over the past four decades, scholars have attempted to theorize a possible withering-away of the Party leading to the triumph of law, followed by a potential separation of the Party from the law through the development of a dual state theory, but only to find the re-normalization of the Party domination and the re-emergence of an omnipresent Party. The relationship between anti-corruption legal institutions within the Procuratorate and the Party’s in-house disciplinary inspection committees offers a good entry point to track and analyze the dynamic relationship between the Party and the law. The principal argument of this paper is that as regime type has a significant, mutually reinforcing impact on anti-corruption enforcement, China’s Party state develops its own pattern of anti-corruption enforcement that is defined by its authoritarian nature and in turn reinforces this nature.