ABSTRACT
This essay examines issues of human rights in China as they reflect tensions of legitimacy in the relationship between orthodoxy and resistance. These tensions have significant historical antecedents dating back at least to the Hundred Days of Reform in 1898 and the debates about political change in the transition from Imperial Qing to Republican rule in the early twentieth century. Since the (re)establishment of China’s socialist legal system in 1978, law has become a contested domain in which conflicts over human rights are increasingly evident. In recent years, the regime’s exercise of rule through formalistic legal texts and institutions has come into increasing conflict with popular and intellectual demands for substantive protection of individual rights and freedoms. The emergence of intellectual resistance through the Charter 08 Movement, professional resistance by human rights lawyers, and popular resistance embodied in unrest over labor relations and environmental protection suggest important challenges to regime orthodoxy in China today. This essay explores these issues of contested legitimacy in the development of China’s socialist legal system.
