William Hurst’s Ruling before the Law adds to the long list of books on comparative studies of Asian legal systems and is probably the first that compares the People’s Republic of China (China or PRC) and Indonesia. The author believes that a comparison between these two very different countries is meaningful because they both have young legal systems in societies with vast regional differences and sharp distinctions between rural and urban areas, and both started in a context of low incomes and poverty. Applying the concept of legal regimes to the two jurisdictions, the book aims to bring a new perspective to the study of law and society and judicial politics, with renewed micro and empirical emphasis on grassroot institutions and activities that are compared not only between the two countries but also within each country.

The book begins with a lengthy explanation of the concept of legal regimes, which serves as the foundation for its analytical framework. Legal regimes are intended by the author to replace the more conventional conceptual ideas of “rule of law” and, presumably, “rule of man” and to offer a more nuanced analytical tool that can more precisely and realistically capture the main characteristics of different legal systems at different times and locations. Legal regimes are premised on the relationships between the polity and state institutions, courts and legal institutions, and social groups and individuals and recognize the two-way causal dynamics between the actors. Thus, there are formally rational pluralistic regimes that are essentially the ideal rule of law systems; mobilization legal regimes in which political power holders make as much use as possible of the law for their own interest and intervene in specific cases whenever they can do so to gain advantages; rule by law regimes in which nonlegal institutions and actors refrain from excessive intervention in specific cases; and neotraditional legal regimes that permit nonlegal actors from a closed and fixed polity to intervene heavily into the adjudication of specific cases. The book uses these legal regimes to guide empirical analysis of the complex realities between China and Indonesia across time, as well as subnational sections within the two countries.

Chapter 2 traces the evolution of the legal systems in China and Indonesia and defines the nature of the legal systems in the two countries at different periods from the perspective of legal regimes. It traces the origin of the PRC legal system to the pre-PRC soviet era of the Chinese Communist Party and divides the PRC period into three phases: the 1949–78 period featuring a mobilizational legal regime in a polity that had mainly criminal laws; the 1979–2001 period that saw the booming stage of China’s effort to build a market-oriented legal system; and the period since 2002 characterized as a hybrid legal regime with a criminal law system defined by neotraditionalism and a civil law system driven by rule by law. In Indonesia, the first three stages under examination are the 1942–45 period (when Indonesia was under Japanese occupation); the 1945–57 period (Indonesia in the early days of independence with a neotraditional legal regime through which the powerful engaged in unconstrained interference into civil disputes to protect their privileged positions); and the 1957–74 period characterized by crisis and transformation of the Indonesian legal system that was essentially a mobilizational legal regime, though it was largely confined to civil disputes rather than criminal justice. The following period, 1974–98, featured the politically privileged elites skillfully using civil ligation to gain economic advantages. Finally, in the period of 1998–2017, when democracy had already taken root in Indonesia, the country nevertheless continued with its hybrid legal regime.

The next three chapters examine, with dependable empirical research in the form of case studies, how the mobilizational legal regime, the rule by law regime, and the nontraditional legal regime have been presented in Indonesia and China, across time and in rural and urban regions. For mobilizational legal regime periods, the book points out that, in Indonesia during the Guided Democracy, the criminal law system was at the rudimentary stage and could only deal with simple cases. However, the relatively abundant sources of rural civil disputes suggest that mobilizational legal regimes worked through civil law, rather than criminal law, processes to advance redistribution of wealth in favor of the elites. In contrast, the mobilizational regimes in China during Chairman Mao’s reign focused on criminal law to supress political enemies and squeeze them out of the polity in the process of building a new political order.

In more recent periods, rule by law legal regimes have begun to prevail in the two countries, though they have focused on civil adjudication in China and criminal justice in Indonesia, as chapter 4 demonstrates. In China, disputes were increasingly adjudicated according to clearly established rules, suggesting the steady growth of a rule by law regime during the first two decades of economic reform. The rule of law developed even more in urban areas, where adjudication was predictable, transparent, coherent, and clear to all parties, even taking into consideration the occasional invention of nonlegal factors. In contrast, it was in criminal law where a rule by law regime was firmly built in Indonesia. Overall, the judicial process in Indonesia, across urban and rural regions, has become remarkably predictable, consistent, and largely free of intervention from nonlegal actors, and the courts increasingly transparent and professionalized over the past few decades. Although democratization is arguably behind the change in criminal justice in Indonesia, that legitimacy is dependent on economic growth in China has tied the hands of the Chinese authoritarian party-state in civil litigation.

Chapter 5, the lengthiest part of the book, discusses how nontraditional legal regimes are evident in some areas of law in Indonesia and China, making the legal systems in these two countries essentially hybrid regimes. Although Indonesia’s democratization established a rule by law regime in the arena of criminal law that effectively constrained the ability of political actors to interfere in criminal cases, it has in no way undermined the elites’ meddling with civil disputes; there, neotraditionalism still prevails to allow distribution of the economic benefits in civil law cases in favor of the privileged classes. In China, Hurst argues, the hybrid composition is the opposite of Indonesia’s blend of neotraditionalism in civil law and a rule by law regime in criminal law; it is instead a hybrid regime of a rule by law order in civil law and undisputable neotraditional legal regime in the arena of criminal law. The empirical study of legal cases relating to a series of political-legal events in China, including the “strike hard” (yanda) campaign, the crackdown in the aftermath of June 4, 1989, and renewed campaigns in the 1990s and later stages, ensured that the neotraditional legal regime is deeply embedded in China’s criminal justice system and most likely here to stay in the foreseeable future. Very strikingly, the chapter points out that in China neotraditional regimes are the most stable of all the legal regimes examined in the book.

Hurst concludes by returning to the conceptual framework of legal regimes. He stresses that legal regimes are legal systems. Treating legal regimes as such leads to the recognition that all the ones covered in this book, even the mobilizational regimes, are in fact legal systems. This enables Hurst to analyze the ruling systems on their own terms. This chapter also restates a wise position that is an essential theoretical assumption of the book: legal regimes are products of political processes and power relations, providing a stark contrast to many other books about Chinese law premised on the assumption that law is a static factor that determines political and economic development, rather than the other way round. Finally, in the author’s view, the concepts and arguments developed from the comparative study of China and Indonesia can be extended into general frameworks and hypotheses for analyzing other jurisdictions.

By articulating and applying the concept of legal regimes, this book provides a fresh analytical framework to compare side by side the legal systems in China and Indonesia. Compared with the traditional dichotomy of rule of law/rule of man, the formally rational pluralistic, mobilizational, rule by law, and neotraditional regimes capture more precisely and in more nuanced fashion the characteristics of legal systems at different historical periods and with respect to different aspects of legal and political life.

A finicky reader may argue that the book has not provided a strong enough theoretical basis for the four legal regimes. For example, what are the theoretical origins of the legal regimes? What are the elements necessary to coherently form a legal regime? Without a strong theoretical explanation of the constitutive elements of each legal regime, as well as a discussion of the relationships between the different legal regimes under one theoretical umbrella that is supposed to come from conventional theories of the rule of law, the four legal regimes may arguably be viewed by some more as convenient terms. Lastly, one may also ask whether the empirical case studies make unique contributions insofar as the book’s findings are concerned. Would an analysis of legislation (including judicial interpretations) and other legal documents reach the same conclusions? After all, the book almost entirely relies on the qualitative study of a rich body of cases to come to its conclusions, some of which are not surprising to old hands in the study of Chinese law.