1. Susan Trevaskes is Lecturer in the School of Languages and Applied Linguistics at Griffith University, Australia.
2. Asian Survey, 42:5, pp. 673-693. ISSN: 0004-4687 c 2002 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Send Requests for Permission to Reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center St., Ste. 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.
3. 2 The court system in the PRC comprises four levels: the Supreme People's Court, the (provincial) higher people's courts, the (municipal) intermediate people's courts, and basic people's courts at the county or municipal district level. The Party exercises its leadership of courts firstly through the Political-Legal Committee (zhengfa weiyuanhui), which is part of the Communist Party bureaucracy, and secondly through local Party committees within courts and local government offices. Local Party committees (dangwei) at each corresponding level of government appoint "leading party member groups" (dangzu) in state organs. Dangzu have the responsibility of implementing Party policy and decisions, coordinating relationships between Party and non-Party cadres, and improving organizational structures. At a national level, the CCP Central Committee's Political-Legal Committee supervises the courts and formulates legal policy. At the local level, political-legal committees are organized as a subsidiary organ in the Party committee at each level of the hierarchy of administration. The courts' own party organization, the dangzu, operates at each administrative level under the central Party leadership. In matters of organization (personnel), the political-legal committee acts in concert with another wing of the
4. Party bureaucracy, the Organizational Department (zuzhibu), to select suitable candidates for leadership positions in courts before they are formally nominated by the people's congress at the corresponding level.