Global Constitutionalism and the People’s Republic of China: Dignity as the 'Fundamental Basis' of the Legal System

Abstract

The People’s Republic of China has declared personal dignity to be a foundational norm of the legal system, as institutionalized through a suite of constitutional and legislative reforms. Indeed, the 2017–2021 period features a set of the most far-reaching statutes in the history of the PRC, the centerpiece of which is the new Civil Code (2021). In both structure and content, certain statutory provisions of the Code deserve to be analyzed as a quasi-constitutional charter of rights. Many Chinese scholars do just that, developing sophisticated constitutional theory along the way. At the core of these claims is dignity, which is treated as an overarching meta-norm from which a list of additional rights, including unenumerated freedoms, can be derived. After situating these developments in light of the global constitutionalism, we examine the emergence of dignity as an officially-sanctioned commitment device, analyze the pertinent scholarly discourse, the normative structure of the new Civil Code, and the various roles that the Communist Party of China, the National People’s Congress, and the Supreme People’s Court, are expected to perform in supervising the work of the judiciary.