Ewan Smith has written a thoughtful and nuanced review of Socialist Law in Socialist East Asia that effectively highlights the main difficulties in researching and analyzing socialist law in East Asia. He has a keen understanding of socialist law and supports the objective of the book, which is to place ‘socialism back in the foreground of our analysis of law in East Asia’. He discusses the problems the authors faced in disentangling socialist law from socialist state institutions. In addition, he reflects on what ‘socialist’ law might resemble if it were disaggregated from Marxist-Leninist thought. Smith also points out that law is not socialist just because self-declared socialist states say it is socialist. Or as he eloquently puts it: ‘The party's account of socialist law is a treacherous guide to its true nature and true objectives’.

Our first point is a simple clarification. The book confined socialist East Asia to China and Vietnam, not because the Democratic Republic of Korea and Laos were considered non-socialist states, but rather, as the Introduction explains, because there is a scarcity of legal research materials dealing with these countries (ch 1).

On a more substantive note, Smith encourages a ‘value-led’ approach to socialist law that applies the categories of liberalism to socialist law. As he comments, the ideas in the book should be given the ‘same treatment meted out to Republicanism, parliamentary democracy, or strong-form constitutional review’. The book, however, explicitly seeks to shift the ‘analytical focus away from liberal legalism’ (p 20). In fact, one of the central arguments in the book is that this kind of value-led comparative approach has tended to obscure the ongoing justifications, practices, and resilience of socialist law (chs 1 & 3). The book therefore proceeds on the understanding that the necessary first step is to uncover, understand, and identify the basis of socialist law. Only in this way can we begin to understand the ongoing resilience of socialist legality.

The book seeks to uncover this resilience by looking to both its practice and justifications from an internal perspective. It seeks to gain this internal viewpoint by examining these institutions historically, comparatively (particularly with other proclaimed socialist models), and conceptually. The ambition is to take these legal practices, institutions, and ideas as they stand in Vietnam and China. For instance, consider the central concept of supervision in the socialist tradition. Although there are varying institutional examples of supervision, there are similar justifications behind it. In part, at least, supervision is justified as a flexible and effective instrument of a centrally-controlled modernization project. This was reflected in the Russian practice in the Procuracy, which had its roots in the centralized governance of the Tsarist Russian empire.Footnote ¹ The Procuracy was therefore involved in both controlling the peripheries and their legal acts, as well as taking petitions from individuals seeking some remedy for these acts. Underlying this practice was a belief that centralization – and not dispersion of power – is necessary to pursue the general good.

To evaluate these justifications is important, and Smith is right to remind us of this need. But we argue that the most compelling normative evaluation of socialist law is on its own terms and according to its own internal justifications. This means, for instance, asking whether supervision ultimately helps the modernization project. Does it really centralize and foster a more efficient centrally-led modernization? Or is it actually hindering the process of modernization? Smith also argues that we should explain socialist law without cossetting it. We agree, but we have attempted to avoid the value-led comparative approach taken in many other critiques. As Smith notes: ‘liberal scholars writing in China [have the] general aim … to challenge what they see as an attenuated version of liberal legality.’ We wanted to avoid analyzing socialist legality from this external normative lens.

As the historical chapters in the book (chs 3–5) make clear, Communist parties, once they take political power, do not intend to relinquish it. The monopolization of power is in the collective DNA of all Leninist parties. For example, the parties in China and Vietnam created a range of illiberal or anti-liberal institutions to obtain and sustain political power, such as democratic centralism, politicized central supervision, and the selective reliance on and displacement of legality (chs 8–10).

At the same time, however, the book aims to show that the socialist project is not entirely about the monopolization of political power. Party rules in China and Vietnam are based on a set of socialist values and a commitment to rule morally, which is used to legitimize the continuing monopoly of political power. Party leaders have rediscovered, revamped, and reinforced socialist legal values, and, to a far more limited degree, put those values into practice to protect the rights of workers and peasants, and the rights and interests of ‘vulnerable groups’ (p 155–158). As the book makes clear, equality receives significant political and legislative attention, and this rhetorical attention has from time to time translated into legal rights and practices (p 147–155 and 186–192). For example, the protection of labour rights in socialist East Asia is arguably stronger than protections found in non-socialist East Asian states at comparable levels of development.Footnote ² This analysis also suggests growing differences between Chinese and Vietnamese socialisms.

Constitutional pronouncements that China and Vietnam are worker states, coupled with statements in party statutes that the party is the vanguard of the working class, cannot be easily ignored, despite mixed-market economic reforms. This ideological commitment is translated into legal protection of labour rights (chs 10–11), effective poverty reduction, and the provision of legal aid for the poor. It is also reflected in institutional designs that aim to make the party-state responsive to people's demands in selected areas.Footnote ³ All are values and practices regarded as socialist, and Leninist parties are effective in creating and enforcing those rights when the political will exists.

There are of course built-in tensions in the party-state structure. Communist parties cannot maintain themselves and justify their leadership without amplifying and relying on those values, but at the same time, the political and economic realities are such that the implementation of socialist values is structurally and conceptually limited. Party leaders are thus torn by a tension between an imperative to promote socialist equality and associated legal rights, and structural, ideological, and economic constraints on their implementation. This tension explains the large gap between the socialist aspirations of the legal system and the practice on the ground. It also explains the widespread bottom-up advocacy for labour and land rights noted in this book – these are tolerated provided they do not challenge party leadership.

It is because of this tension between socialist aspirations and Leninist imperatives that we argue that socialist law should be taken seriously on its own merits and studied from an internal perspective – just as we take Republicanism, parliamentary democracy, or strong-form constitutional review seriously and analyze them on their own merits.

Finally, in his review, Smith focused exclusively on the constitutional aspects of socialist legality, such as democratic socialism and socialist institutions. We also argued in the book that a focus on constitutional settings misses much of the regulatory action relating to socialist law. The book draws attention to the way that legal categories and regulatory processes function as constraints on the regulatory options available to party leaders and officials. To understand how these constraints shape governance, the book focuses attention on continuities and changes in regulatory signalling – the ideological and normative messages sent by state regulation – and regulatory technologies – the methods and logic of regulation. Using this approach, we found striking continuities in the methods and logics of regulation over a period of profound economic and social changes (chs 12–13). Although command planning was abandoned decades ago, many regulatory techniques forged during this period are still used to control the mixed-market economy, labour, and land regulation. A key contribution of the book is therefore to show that the constraints created by regulatory epistemologies and technologies, as much as constitutional settings, shape socialist law in China and Vietnam.

In sum, we thank Smith for his review of the book and we hope that the discussion of socialist law that it has triggered can continue as a new area of comparative and theoretical research.