China’s Legal System and the Fourth Plenum

[...]perhaps the most important dog that did not bark is the Fourth Plenum's failure to propose reforms to a long-standing feature of China's legal-administrative system that is a major obstacle to the establishment of rule-based government, whether rule by law or the more exalted rule of law: the centralization of rule-making power coupled with the decentralization of administrative power.3 In other words, rules are made at the provincial and central levels, in which the bureaucracies tend to be woefully understaffed and do not deliver government services directly to the public. [...]some of the fundamental obstacles to rule by law, to say nothing of rule of law, exist in the everyday practice of government regulation, long before any disputes reach the courts, and may well swamp whatever salutary effects are obtained by reforms to the system of courts and judges.