I. Introduction

A. The CCPNC and its Report

The Chinese Communist Party’s National Congress (CCPNC) is held every five years and convened by the Central Committee. This year, the 18th CCPNC was held in Beijing from 8th to 14th November, during which the so-called 5th generation of Chinese leadership was elected to take the helm of the country for the next five to ten years. Besides the election of the Central Committee, Politburo and the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC), another important function and power of the CCPNC is “to hear and examine the reports of the Central Committee” . At the beginning of each CCPNC, the General Secretary of CCP will produce a political report that summarizes the work conducted during the past five years, points out inadequacies and underlying problems still to be resolved, and more importantly, clarifies the guiding principles and priorities for the next five years for the Party and the State. Though some of Chinese political jargons in such reports might seem dry and repetitive in the eyes of observers, the quinquennial modeled reports do play an important role in Chinese political life.

B．A Reflection CCP guidelines and social needs

Formulation and expressions of CCP slogans can be a sensitive and a regular means to signal delicate political messages. Choosing the proper words, then, is usually a lengthy process. In the same vein, it usually takes about a year to complete the drafting of these reports. For instance, the drafting process for the 18th CCPNC was launched in January 2012 under the co-leadership of the outgoing general secretary Hu Jintao and his successor Xi Jinping. The group had sent hundreds of research groups to different sectors and localities to conduct covert surveys and research in order to produce various reports that were to be discussed first by the group leaders and general secretary, then in the PSC, and later among other Politburo members. The revised version would then be delivered to other party organizations such the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), local party groups, retired leaders, other democratic parties and non-partisans for consultation before it was handed back to the drafting group for the final rounds of revision. Even during the Congress session, the drafting group still received feedback from discussion panels and made relevant revisions until its final adoption in the very last closed meeting.

Considering their meticulous preparations and political significance, these political reports can indeed shed light on the historical background and tendencies of shifting political agendas in China.

Given the lengthiness of these reports and the kaleidoscope of policy areas covered by them, a general analysis would be useless in pinning down key ideas or problems. However, a detailed study into a specific policy area can help clarify its evolution and suggest the future direction it may take.

C. Content on legal and judicial construction

Enormous amounts of literature have focused on the socioeconomic developments of China since the Third Plenary Session of the Seventh Congress of the Central Committee of the CCP in 1978, when China adopted the “Opening-up and Reform policy. However, in tandem with the economic boom, China has also embarked on comprehensive legal (re)construction after the havoc of Cultural Revolution in order to pave the road for economic development. As the Reports have shown, legal/judicial reform is an indispensable factor in Chinese political reform, and it has undergone different phases that have assisted China’s reintegration into the world. Previous research analyzing this reform has done so through close readings of the Government Work Reports (政府工作报告) delivered by the Premier in the annual National People’s Congress (NPC) or the Annual Report of China’s Rule of Law Construction (中国法治建设年度报告). However, the CCPNC Reports can offer another perspective, perhaps more pertinent, because of the CCP’s status as the ruling party. Therefore, an analysis of the contents which are abandoned, inherited, modified, reiterated and newly advocated in certain chapters of the Reports since the 12th CCPNC will be a valuable method to shed some light upon the Chinese legal/judicial construction process that has been ongoing the past three decades.

This paper attempts to approach the legal/judicial construction agenda of the past seven CCPNCs from a more specific perspective. First, we will start with a chronologic analysis to look into the differences and particularities of each CCPNC Report since 1982. Then, a frequency analysis on key-words in the whole text of the CCPNC Report will be conducted which includes an artificial selection of notional ones. For example, in Chinese, a search for legal system (法制), could turn up results for the expression judicial system (司法制度), which may influence the relevance of the results. Continuing from this, results with opposite meanings were also eliminated. For instance, the word freedom (自由) might be contained in the expression “combat bourgeois liberalization”(反对资产阶级自由化). Based on the results obtained from both qualitative and quantitative studies, the legal/judicial construction process is divided into three different periods with each period having specific priorities.