From May 30th to 31st, “Interdisciplinary Conference for Advance in the Research of Law and Politics” was held in Xushui. This conference was collaboratively held by Unirule Institute of Economics, Institute for Public Policy of Zhejiang University, and Dawu Enterprise Culture Institute.

The conference was conducted in a rather intense manner where there were 17 units, 9 hours of discussion every day. 17 scholars gave keynote speeches during the conference, about 80 comments were presented. The attendees of this conference discussed various issues against the backdrop of the current political and social transitions with a focus on the area of law and politics.

The first issue concerns constitutionalism and the rule of law.

Professor JIANG Ping spoke on the self governance of the society and China’s transition and proposed four major aspects of the self governance: administrative decoupling, independence of the program, democratic elections, and professional governance. He thought self governance could be the breakthrough for promoting political system reforms and facilitating social transition.

 Professor GUO Daohui discussed China’s rule of law in the world. He pointed out that China’s rule of law differed from that of other countries and stated that China’s should follow the trend of the world.

 Professor XU Zhangrun started with the citizen model and discussed the 6 pairs of contradictions and relations amongst them for modern nation construction. He also proposed solutions to these contradictions by compromise.

Associate Professor WANG Jianxun discussed China’s way of constitutionalism and pointed out the difference between centralisation of the power and federalism. He believed only by performing federalism could self governance and civil liberty be realised.

 Mr. CHEN Youxi talked about the constitutional consensus and the phased goal and proposed that in the current situation of the current constitution, the constitutional review may be an important goal to achieve constitutional consensus.

The second issue concerns learning from historic experience and pursuing constitutionalism and the rule of law.

Professor XU Jilin proposed a framework for analysis based the history of the early Mingguo Times. He mentioned the struggles among multiple social forces for the state power and the state authority. The path chosen at the time was a British constitutionalism which later shifted to the American constitutional democracy model that further deteriorated to dictatorship.