Building the Rule of Law in China

HISTORIANS give us many reasons for the collapse of the Qing Dynasty （1644-1911）. In one form or another, nearly all of these come back to the inabil- ity to change or meet new challenges. But if the hall- mark of the dynasty was its inability to change, then a case can be made that the opposite has been true of the Communist Party of China （CPC）. In modern times,

Empirical Human Rights Studies Contribute to Building a Society Under the Rule of Law——Summary of the Fifth National Meeting for the Exchange of Work Experience Among Human Rights Research Institutions

From Nov. 5 to 6, 2013, the China Society for Human Rights Studies （CSHRS）held the Fifth National Meeting for the Exchange of Work Experience Among Human Rights Research Institutions at Wuhan University. More than 100 experts and scholars, focusing on empirical human rights studies and their contribution to building a society based on the rule of law, shared their work experience and discussed effective strategies. CSHRS President Luo Haocai, who served as vice chairman of the 10th National Committee of the Chinese People＇s Political Consultative Conference,

Policy Analysis on Building Regulations and the Recovery of Earthquake and Tsunami Affected Areas

The paper examines the situation and causes of recent big earthquake and tsunami disasters especially in the case of the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, and analyzes the damage to extract lessons on safety of buildings and recovery of cities from the view point of building regulations such as the Article 39 of the Building Standard Law. In addition, the Article 8 of the Ordinance of City Planning Law resulted in not so effective against tsunami in March 2011. Control mechanisms of building construction should be integrated into socio-economic, institutional, technical and other policy tools. In order to mitigate earthquake risk, all stages of building construction, from location, planning and construction to maintenance are important. Awareness creation is instrumental for building culture of safety and demands for intervention in disaster mitigation. The demands ultimately help in creating conducive environment for policy intervention, in realizing institutional mechanism of building code enforcement and land use control for the municipal authorities and in creating demand for competent professionals.

Damage Analysis of the Great East Japan Earthquake

This paper tries to comprehensively summarize the reasons of damages at the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011 and what are the lessons in terms of earthquake and tsunami safety of building and cities. The paper examines the damage of tsunami affected areas and analyses the damage to extract lessons in order to safely reconstruct the affected areas from the view point of building regulations such as ＂Disaster Risk Area＂ provided by the Article 39 of the Building Standard Law and the Urbanization Control Area and UPA （Urbanization Promotion Area） provided by the Article 8 of the Ordinance of the City Planning Law of Japan.

How to Evaluate Government Performance While Constructing a Rule of Law Government in China＊

Constructing a law-based government is a core element of the comprehensive framework for promoting the rule of law in China, while using evaluation to catalyze growth is in line with the incentive principle of management studies. Since China started to implement reform and opening up over thirty years ago, rule of law development and organizational evaluation have gone through several stages, each with different characteristics. Efforts to build a law-based government have met with success, but what the country now has is essentially still goal-oriented assessment. At present, this suffers from the lack of a clear goal orientation or definition of functions, an imperfect technical system and unsound motivation mechanisms, not to mention the practical problems of each government department going its own way, duplicating evaluations or being left rudderless. Drawing on a combination of value rationality and instrumental rationality and using government performance evaluation to promote the building of a law-based government not only conforms to the spirit of the rule of law and value rationality in government performance, but also strengthens the role of evaluation as an instrument for organizational management. Therefore, we need to create new evaluation theories, expand public participation, introducing diversified evaluating entities, improve technical systems, strengthen institutional buildup, and foster a performance-based culture. In addition, replacing goal-oriented assessment with performance evaluation will help the emergence of a new discipline--the performance evaluation of rule of law government, thus promoting multidisciplinary efforts to integrate and create new public administration theories in China.