Abstract

The paper discusses some of the major developments in the political and economic orientation of Chinese law, immediately prior to the beginning of great-scale economic reforms, through the lens of the constitutional phase leading to the short-lived Constitution of 1978. The aim of the analysis is on the one hand to illustrate the dialectic between different approaches to reforms within the Chinese leadership and, on the other hand, to point out how such dialectic affected the renaissance of a legal thinking and of an interest in foreign law. At the same time, the analysis briefly focuses on some possible divergences that could have happened in the historical path of reforms.