Socialist Core Values in Chinese Courts

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Björn Ahl; Dr. Daniel Sprick
• Subject Area: Principles of Law and Jurisprudence ; Asian Studies
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 543594814

Since 2012 China’s party state has propagated a catalogue of twelve Socialist Core Values (SCV), aiming at their integration into every aspect of state activity, including the judiciary. In 2021 the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) issued a directive that ordered courts to cite these values in their decisions. This project investigates the various modes and channels of integrating SCV into the judicial application of law. For this purpose, we analyse the SPC’s efforts in translating policy directives into specific guidance for lower-level courts. We juxtapose this top-down perspective with an analysis of court decisions, in which judges cite SCV or litigants use them in arguing their case before the courts. The possible implications for judicial practice are multifaceted and range from mere rhetorical use or the consistent interpretation of law with SCV, to the arbitrary application of law and the evasion of legal requirements justified on the basis of SCV. We analyse the scope, functions, legal argumentative contexts, and the meaning of SCV that is attached to them in the process of judicial application. Further, the study focuses on the consequences of the use of SCV in judicial practice for the predictability and the autonomy of authoritarian law. The analysis of court decisions referring to SCV will enable a well-founded evaluation of a so far understudied development of the Xi era, which aims at a comprehensive ideological penetration of the legal system.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants