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4 Rev. Socialist L. 309 (1978)
The 1978 Constitution of the People's Republic of China

handle is hein.journals/rsl4 and id is 311 raw text is: The 1978 Constitution of the People's Republic of China Ph. de Heer Second Secretary of the Royal Netherlands Embassy at Peking, PRC. On 5 March 1978, the fifth National People's Congress (NPC) adopted at its first session the present constitution.' This document is the fourth of its kind in the constitutional history of the People's Republic of China (PRC).2 The text has been drafted, according to the rapporteur on the revision of the (1975) Constitu- tion, Marshal Yeh Chien-ying, by the Committee for Revising the Constitution, headed by Chairman Hua Kuo-feng, and composed of all the comrades on the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.3 The purpose of this article is to analyze this new fundamental law by comparing it to its immediate and more distant predecessors, and by trying to explain changes and additions in the light of the political struggles and policy changes of the past few years. 1. The Political Background The adoption of the 1975 Constitution can be viewed as an attempt by Mao Tse-tung and his radical followers to legalize the changes brought about by the Cultural Revolution, which had uprooted both the State and Party hierarchy and reestablished Mao's dominant position in China's political life.4 This attempt was made necessary by the return, since about 1972, of a conti- nually increasing number of older cadres under the aegis of Premier Chou En- lai. Mao and his faction rightly suspected that these r6habilit6s-who in 1966- 1968 had been forced out of the positions they often had held since the founding of the PRC in 1949-were hostile to the newborn things of the Cultural Revolution. To stem this tide and its influence, a long overdue fourth NPC was hastily convened in January 1975, and in great secrecy adopted a new constitu- tion: a relatively short document, filled with radical battlecries. The most prominent of the r6habilit6s was Teng Hsiao-ping, who had been the Party Secretary-General up till 1966, and who was most presumably selected by Chou En-lai to be his successor. But Teng's abrasive perwonality, and his caustic remarks on many things the radical faction held dear, caused his seconfd fall into disgrace, shortly after his protector Chou died in January 1976. In the ensuing political stalemate, in which neither the old guard nor the radicals could force a breakthrough in nominating a new Premier of their choice, a © Sijthoff & Noordhoff, Alphen aan den Rijn, The Netherlands 4 Rev. Soc. Law 1978 No. 4, pp. 309-322

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