중국 2018년 헌법 개정의 경과와 주요 내용 고찰

Abstract

The constitution constituting the core of a state’s legal system is called as the basic law or the fundamental law of a state. This is the same in China, which is a socialist state. However, the People’ Republic of China, which was founded in 1949 under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, is a party-state system. In other words, it is the political system of dominating state and society based on the Chinese Communist Party. In that sense, constitutional amendment in China reflects <Party Constitution> decided during conference of the Communist Party and it is the process to ratify a series of reforms. Until now, since the status of constitution in China remained at identifying ideology and policy of the Chinese Communist Party as state norms, constitution has been unable to perform its role as the basic law and the fundamental law. However, since ruling by the law and ruling by constitution have been emphasized ever since the inauguration of the Xi Jinping, the importance of constitution is drawing much more attention than ever before. This study has been conducted by focusing on the constitutional amendment progress last year and the analysis of the main contents. The fifth constitutional amendment in 2018 takes partial amendment form in the form of the fifth amendment of <The 1982 Constitution> but there has been major changes which may compare to entire amendment when referring to significance of amendment contents. In addition, the constitutional amendment in 2018 took place in all 21 clauses and the main contents were reorganization of government organizations including Chinese characteristic socialism ideology in new Xi Jinping era, abolition of term limit of president and vice premier, establishment of the National Supervisory Committee, granting legislative power to city divided into districts, and reorganization of constitution and law commission. A significant portion of this study merely examined main contents and normative meaning of Chinese constitutional amendment. However, the direction of future studies should be systematically understanding continuous changes of Chinese politics, society, economy, and culture and Chinese constitutional growth and development. The 2018 Chinese Constitutional Amendment was conducted in 14 years in the year celebrating the 40th anniversary of 1978 Chinese reform and opening. In particular, it is assessed to be a significant legal reform to determine the success or failure of materializing ‘revival of China’ and ‘China Dream’ during the second term of the Xi Jinping reign (2018 2023).