Such terminology—a raft of commandeered and hollowed-out concepts—is nothing new in the annals of Chinese Communist Party propaganda. You will find therein plenty of references to “rule of law,” “freedom,” “democracy,” “rights,” “justice,” the whole shebang of political and ethical ideas that mean something valid and valuable in other minds and hands.
To subvert while pretending to uphold the values and institutions that these terms originally refer to is part of a strategy.
So the CCP has often babbled about “rule of law,” than which it regards nothing as more irrelevant. But now Xi Jinping has issued a “New Instruction on Rule of Law in China” (Newsweek, November 19, 2025). New how?
Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for the promotion of “law-based governance” under the leadership of the ruling Chinese Communist Party and for concerted efforts to break new ground in advancing the rule of law in China, state media reported.
The internal workings of Xi’s leadership and the CCP are notoriously opaque, but the announcement on the rule of law can be seen to highlight the primacy of two of Xi’s core objectives: political stability with him and the party at the center of power and the promotion of his ideology for guiding the country’s development.
Xi, who is chairman of the CCP, highlighted at a recent party conference “the necessity of safeguarding and promoting social fairness and justice, and comprehensively advancing rule of law in all aspects of the country’s work,” the state-run People’s Daily newspaper reported on Tuesday.
“Xi emphasized that a framework for promoting law-based governance on all fronts has basically taken shape, the system of socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics continues to improve, and the path of socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics is becoming broader,” the newspaper said.
A new surge of “law-based governance on all fronts,” with “rule of law” (no, “socialist rule of law”) and “justice” (no, “social justice”)—while still imprisoning critics, enforcing slave labor, and murdering Uyghurs and practitioners of Falun Gong in order to harvest their organs?
The explanation of this fictional expansion of the CCP’s nonexistent respect for the rule of law is provided by Chinese dissidents who, according to Newsweek, say that the call for “ ‘law-based governance’ serves to promote Xi’s ideology and provide an appearance of legitimacy while dissent is stifled.” In brief, he’s lying. But he’s also not lying, because he’s using the totalitarian’s secret yet overt opposite meanings of the words.
The Party has always been in favor of “law-based governance” and “rule of law” on the understanding that “law” is whatever the guy or guys at the top arbitrarily decree. It’s the thing that issues from the barrel of a gun. In this sense or anti-sense of the term, Mao Zedong, who was responsible for hundreds, then thousands, then millions of murders, was a consistent defender of “law” and “rule of law” and “law-based governance.”
