As the Chinese economy grows larger and stronger, the progressing of reform in the legal and political areas is less obvious and some measures are even surprising and controversial to international observers. One of the most heatedly debated areas is judicial reform, seemingly quite contrary to the expectations of many lawyers and legal scholars within and without China, have in recent years brought back a variety of informal institutions that have their roots in China’s ancient and socialist legal traditions.

It’s widely recognized that a functioning judiciary is key to China’s legal and political reform. Successful judicial reform is both a legal and political process. On one hand, judicial reform as a political project that requires changing the contents of existing legislations to empower the judiciary with new legal institutions, which needs a friendly political environment. On the other hand, judicial reform inevitably involves reform of various aspects of the structural political system and will result in rebalancing and even redistribution of political powers in the system. China’s recent one-in-a-decade transfer of leadership has ignited the hope for creating a more independent, impartial and professionalized judiciary in China in the light of the much anticipated political reform.

The project, jointly organized by CALS and the East Asian Institute (EAI) of National University of Singapore, will bring a group of international distinguished scholars from China, Singapore, and North America to discuss, from different perspectives, the judicial reform and its implications for political development in China. The covered topics include the state of judicial reform in China, judicial independence, judicial corruption, judicial capacity building, and the political environment for judicial reform.