Politics and Constitution in China

In: Government & opposition: an international journal of comparative politics, Band 16, Heft 3, S. 317-330

Abstract

ONE APPROACH TO STUDYING THE CONSTITUTIONS OF THE People's Republic of China (PRC) has been to conclude that they are really a sham, designed to conceal the absence of citizen rights, and therefore presumably of little benefit as documents for study. Constitutions, however, are forms of political expression, and are perhaps best approached as reflections of changes in policy orientation. Their purposes include the formal institutionalization of past changes, the expression of immediate political priorities and laying the foundations for reorientations in basic policy.