| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 法律科際整合研究所 === 105 === Xinfang system (Or letters and visits system) was created to provide the people with a way of political expression and injustice relief in the 1950s, however, it caused a lot of controversies in practice. Afterwards, Chinese Communist Party(CCP) put forward the slogans of “rule of law” and the “rule of law in Xinfang system”.
This paper examines the construction of the legitimacy of the CCP regime from the perspective of the Xinfang system, inquiring how CCP gains the legitimacy of the regime through the Xinfang system, and whether the current controversies in practice and the “rule of law in Xinfang system” slogan have a relation with the transformation of legitimacy. This paper will discuss legitimacy under the definition of Max Weber, considering it as the public recognition for the rule and dominance with the empirical meaning rather than the evaluative one.
The research methods in this paper include literature analysis and field research, summing up the historical “performance legitimacy”, “social stability legitimacy” and “ideology legitimacy” stages. Firstly, this paper studies the history of the Xinfang system and finds out that the Xinfang system is an important way for the people to relieve injustice in the early years, by which CCP obtained a very high “performance legitimacy”. Then, with the relief function missing gradually, the Xinfang system, together with the people’s mediation system and the judicial system constitute the net of power in the grassroots. The net of power, along with the internal pressurized system in the Xinfang system, dominate the Grassroots petitioners’ action strategies and the Xinfang departments’ dealing with the appeals. So the Xinfang system essentially become an important tool for grassroots governance and the maintenance of stability, thus providing strong “social stability legitimacy”. What’s more, CCP repeatedly emphasized "mass line" and its justice arbiter role in the practice of Xinfang, which offers “ideology legitimacy” for the CCP regime. However, with the accumulation of social problems and the elevation of people’s rights awareness, CCP begins to fail in grassroots governance by means of the power functioning in Xinfang system and face great challenges in obtaining legitimacy by social performance and stability. Under this background, CCP put forward the “rule of law” and “rule of law in Xinfang system” slogans. By investigating the practice of the Xinfang system and the Xinfang legalization slogans, this paper reveals the contradiction in the Xinfang system between the traditional maintenance of stability thinking and the rule of law transformation in reality. Further more, this paper points out it’s CCP’s intention to transform the traditional “performance legitimacy”, “social stability legitimacy” and “ideology legitimacy” to the legitimacy of rational-legal authority, so that CCP can solve the problem of legitimacy once and for all.
Based on the Xinfang system history, practice and discourse, this paper explicitly states the specific relationship between the Xinfang system and the legitimacy building of CCP regime for the first time. After discussing that the practice and transformation of Xinfang system offer CCP a kind of legitimacy under Weber’s definition, this paper further claims that only the unity of the empirical and evaluative legitimacy can lead to a good, long-term, effective rational-legal authority.
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