This chapter examines how the Chinese Communist Party restructured the judicial bureaucracy to insulate the normative state from local prerogative interference. It analyzes two key institutional reforms: the recentralization of court personnel and budget authority at the provincial level, and the introduction of judicial accountability mechanisms that emphasized individual responsibility over hierarchical oversight. These reforms aimed to curtail local protectionism, rent-seeking, and extrajudicial intervention by strengthening vertical discipline and professionalizing frontline adjudication. While they marked a significant departure from the locally embedded judiciary of the pre-Xi era, their success was uneven across regions and constrained by enduring informal practices. The chapter argues that institutional design played an important role in carving out a more autonomous legal space within the authoritarian state, even if that space remained contingent and selectively realized in practice.