Almost 35 years after Mao Zedong's death, China-watchers still debate his influence. Does his distinctive adaptation of Marxist-Leninist ideology continue to guide the policies, politics and practices of an increasingly powerful party-state that now confronts challenges the chairman never had to face? Some maintain that Maoism long ago lost its ability to affect official conduct and today serves mainly to project an image of communist continuity amid profound national transformations.
Other observers see, at least in certain aspects of government, the persisting relevance of Maoist thought, especially since 2007, when the 17th party congress launched an effort to recreate the 'red culture' of the party's revolutionary pre-'Liberation' past.
The administration of criminal justice is surely one prominent area where the chairman's thinking has left an indelible impact, despite the large body of laws, regulations and interpretations promulgated since 1979. Beijing's increasingly expert legal officials, like law reformers in other countries, seek the right balance between protecting basic rights of all suspects and ensuring punishment of the guilty, and some legislative progress continues even in the present conservative political environment.
Nevertheless, foreign observers, not to mention China's able criminal defence lawyers and legal scholars, daily encounter cases where 'politics takes command' over law, not only among police and prosecutors but also among judges and justice officials. Indeed, this politicisation of criminal justice follows the public instructions of China's highest leaders.
The legacy of 'Mao Zedong Thought', enshrined in the constitution, is evident in the insistence of President and party General Secretary Hu Jintao, party Political and Legal Affairs Commission chief Zhou Yongkang and Supreme People's Court President Wang Shengjun on the primacy of party over law, in practice as well as theory.
The December 23 detention and brutalisation by Beijing police of law professor Teng Biao and a fellow human rights defender explicitly illustrates the impact of Maoist thought on police practice. In a horrifying report posted online the day after his ordeal, Teng describes how, after trying to persuade his captors that they had no legal authority to interrogate, detain and beat him, the police station atmosphere suddenly became more threatening when an officer named Xu Ping learned that Teng had just visited the mother of a house-church Christian and legal scholar under house arrest elsewhere. Xu shouted: 'Oh, that's how it is! In that case, this just became a contradiction between the enemy and us! ... In that case we don't have to talk about law at all! And you ... won't get out of here again. You traitors, you dogs! Counter-revolutionaries! ... You keep insulting the party. We will treat you just like an enemy!'