Harvard East Asian Monographs, no. 411. Cambridge, MA; London, UK: Harvard University Asia Center; Harvard University Press [distributor], 2018. xviii, 388 pp. (Illustrations.) US$49.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-98385-4.
How did the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) mobilize the masses and social engineer its population through the dissemination of legal knowledge? How did the CCP balance the needs of empowering people with legal “weapons” and the plans of monopolizing legal interpretations in a population with diverse opinions? Addressing all these questions, Jennifer Altehenger’s Legal Lessons: Popularizing Laws in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1989 explores China’s unprecedented campaign of mass legal education and its influences on Chinese politics, culture, and society. Drawing on abundant archival sources in Beijing, Shanghai, and Berlin, Altehenger argues that the dissemination of legal knowledge was essential to the CCP’s governance from 1949 to 1989.
Primarily since its founding, the young CCP regime started some of the most extensive campaigns of mass legal education in the world. The campaigns were closely related to demands for creating new citizens in a “new society,” educating the masses with correct consciousness, and delivering socialist promises in legal reforms (6–16). To break with the “Old China,” party leaders proclaimed that laws were the will of the people (renmin) and aimed to punish the non-people—the enemies of the people (27–42). Nevertheless, the party failed to provide sufficient clarification about a mass campaign to study laws, and few of the propagandists were ready to assume their duties of dissemination work (49–55).
In chapter 2, Altehenger traces the mechanics and structures of law publishing during the early 1950s. Due to the lack of clear ideological guidance, the government developed a number of measures to improve propaganda materials. These measures included producing Illustrated Regulations and Illustrated Marriage Law, mobilizing local cadres to deliver and sell law-related publications, expanding state publishers to outperform private competitors, and placing the circulation of law information under state supervision (62–75).
Chapters 3 and 4 examine how mass legal education was carried out in Beijing and Shanghai. The 1953 Marriage Law campaign declared a divide between the lawful “New Democratic legal system” and unlawful “feudal marriage system.” Using simplified language and painted images, party officials made sense of the “basic spirit” that bounded together law, morality, and people’s consciousness (96–111). Yet the top-down knowledge transmission encountered a dilemma of hierarchical learning as questions raised by propaganda workers, publishers, and local residents all displayed significant challenges regarding the “correct” meaning of the laws (92–96, 119–124). In the end, as Altehenger argues, these two national events left a lasting influence as party officials continued to use many of the techniques developed during this time.
Chapter 5 examines how the CCP adopted the methods used in the 1950s, while also developing a new way to transform Chinese society through laws in the 1970s. The new discourses de-emphasized class struggle and indicated that all members of the populace should help the state gain hegemony and “realize order across the country” (186–187). To achieve stability and unity, the late 1970s law propaganda aimed to smash the “lawlessness” during the past “ten years of turmoil” (177–183), linked legal knowledge with crime prevention (189–197), and asserted that the CCP leadership could assure order (204–211). Chapter 6 further explores how the first five-year plan for the “popularization of common legal knowledge” (1986–1990) turned legal learning into an institutionalized and bureaucratized technique of CCP governance. Facing an increase in commercial media, the CCP strengthened the control of dissemination and responded to the diversification with the quantity of law propaganda and the teaching of “legal consciousness” (216–220), the circulation of law narratives through district gazetteers (227–230), and the construction of new media and propaganda networks (230–243).
Drawing upon abundant archival records, internal reports, newspapers, and posters, Altehenger offers a fresh look into the CCP’s campaigns of disseminating legal knowledge. Her vivid accounts not only demonstrate the significant role of mass legal education in China’s socialist governance, but also disclose the complex dynamics between party leaders, propaganda officials, state and private publishers, and cultural workers in various campaigns. However, while Altehenger exhaustively researches the dynamic evolution of mass legal education and convincingly places it in the broad historical context, some points raised by her analysis also deserve further exploration.
First, Altehenger vigorously demonstrates varied modes of (re-)production and transmission of legal knowledge, and echoes the scholarship that perceives the ritual communication of laws as essential to socialist and late-socialist regimes. Yet she does not provide sufficient discussion on an equally important concept that appears across the book: mass legal education. If mass legal education under the CCP, as Altehenger persuasively presents, had bounded together law, morality, and people’s consciousness, what constructed the ways in which people perceived moral principles, social norms, and political agenda in their not-so-law-related discussions and practices? Did the practice of ordinary people and their debates over their customs, rituals, and communal affairs influence the ways propaganda officials and cultural workers re-define the “correct” and “erroneous” explanations of “laws”? If so, how did the bottom-up perspectives play off the campaigns of mass legal education, and how did their interactions with law propaganda reshape the complex process of China’s dissemination of legal knowledge?
Second, if the core subject of this study includes the mass line of legal education and the popular understandings of the laws, how did the campaigns influence the life of the “masses” (qunzhong)? How did ordinary people strategize their actions between different levels of bureaucracy and the various sorts of local actors throughout these campaigns? What are their stories and perspectives about the dissemination and construction of abstract legal concepts and their associated interpretations?
The third point has to do with the broader historiographical context of the narratives about “lawlessness.” As Altehenger demonstrates, the increased discourses about lawlessness represented a reaction towards the past turmoil during the Cultural Revolution and the emerging socio-economic tensions during the 1980s. Yet such discursive constructions had already appeared in previous periods and continuously influenced Chinese society, politics, and legal culture. Even during the Cultural Revolution, when laws were “largely absent from official discourses,” as Altehenger describes, narratives about crime and justice were not uncommon and were an intriguing part of China’s legal-political culture (for recent studies on the role of law during the Cultural Revolution, see Daniel Leese and Puck Engman eds., Victims, Perpetrators, and the Role of Law in Maoist China: A Case-Study Approach, Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2018). During the 1980s, the campaigns of “strike hard” (yanda) also created a discursive divide between exception and regularity, following the lines of classifying different sorts of citizens. All of these questions require lengthy studies in the future. Altehenger’s analysis provides an excellent starting point for scholarly inquiry into these issues.
Weiting Guo
Aix-Marseille Université, Aix-en-Provence