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I am delighted to post the draft text of remarks I have prepared for delivery at the Workshop on Smart Courts in Comparative Perspective. This workshop is part of the international and interdisciplinary research project"Smart Courts – Disruptive Technologies in China’s Judicial System” at the University of Cologne, funded by the Excellent Research Support Program as a University of Cologne Forum. The project is conducted by the Chair of Chinese Legal Culture and the Chair for Criminal and Criminal Procedure Law – German, European, and international Economic, Tax, and Medical Criminal Law at the University of Cologne.The workshop also integrates the Cologne Talks on Information Law of the Institute of Digitality at University of Cologne.
The description of the workshop from its CfP gives a good idea of the scope of the event:
This workshop aims at bringing together international experts in the field of law, social and political sciences as well as computer sciences to discuss experiences and developmental agendas in different jurisdictions for the purpose of bridging a knowledge gap in the comparative understanding of Smart Courts. By observing emerging practices of integrating technology into different judicial systems and examining general issues of law and digitalization, we attempt to identify trends, shaping future generations of legal professionals and legal education. Thus, while Chinese approaches provide a reference point for the discussion, papers that focus on other jurisdictions are explicitly invited as long as they take on a comparative approach and also combine legal and technological aspects.My presentation is entitled "Smart Court, Smarter Party: A Necessary but Incomplete Interpenetration." The abstract provides a summary of the remarks and
Abstract/Summary: Like many innovations undertaken in China, the project of smart courts 智慧法院 comprises several parts, all of which operationalize important strands of the contemporary Basic Line of the CPC under conditions of the current general contradiction, and guided under the leadership of the CPC toward those ends. Substantial focus on smart courts tend to concentrate on its operation, and on the consequences of that operation for other, related areas of governance and policy with their own operational imperatives. In this sense, the study of smart courts focuses on functionality as a function of objectives: efficiency, justice, consistency, predictability, transparency, etc. It also focuses on the way in which smart court rules and operations may impact other rule/operation systems—data integrity, platform governance, artificial intelligence regulations and the like. These are important areas for the study of the “thing/object” itself—the smart court and its operational system. Nonetheless, the smart court system is itself the manifestation of a deep and dynamic processes of interpenetration [1] manifesting fundamental principles with Chinese characteristics. The thesis of this contribution is this: the Chinese techno-smart [智能 Zhinéng] courts [法院] may be possible only as and to the extent that they are intermeshed with an techno-intelligent [Zhihui 智慧] CPC. In the absence of an equally robust effort to digitize and digitalize the penetrative (supervisory and leadership) functions of the CPC to match that of the administrative apparatus in and as the courts, the possibility of more comprehensively attaining the multiple objectives of the 20th CPC Congress—movement along the path of perfecting Socialist Rule of law, socialist modernization, the overcoming of the current general contradiction, and the movement toward the perfection of CPC and its organs as critical and apex national productive forces may be fully realized.
[1] Interpenetration here is understood in multiple senses—as perichoresis (περιχώρησις) from the Christian engagement with the relationship among the three elements of the Christian Trinity; as "perfect interfusion" (yuanrong, 圓融) from Huayan school (華嚴) of Buddhism and focusing on the phenomenology of reality grounded in mutual containment and consequential permeability of Dharmadhatu ( 法界) the realm of objects and action; as structural coupling in systems theory among deeply intertwined subsystems in dynamic and hierarchical arrangements; in Marxist-Leninist principles of the four Cardinal Principles operationalized within concepts of the mass line, democratic centralism, and people’s democratic dictatorship; and in the fundamental concepts of object-signification-interpretation within semiotics and its phenomenological interplay. ,
The Remarks conclude with a suggestion of the contours of the post-New Era general contradiction, one built on the consequences of successfully meeting the challenge of New-Era Socialist Modernization through high quality production/productivity—the contradiction between tech based and human driven forms of guidance and leadership and with it, the re-conceptualization of the interpenetrative engagements between virtual and human intelligence in the arena of guiding human development.
The text of the Remarks may be accessed HERE: BACKER_Remarks_SmartCourts_Cologn2025 and follows below. The accompanying PPPT will be made available shortly. Comments, reactions, engagement most welcome.
Smart Courts in Comparative Perspective: Chinese Approaches and Global Developments
Workshop
University of Cologne (7/8 July 2025)
Smart Court, Smarter Party: A Necessary but IncompleteInterpenetration
Larry Catá Backer
W. Richard and Mary Eshelman Faculty Scholar; Professor of Law and International Affairs
Pennsylvania State University | 239 Lewis Katz Building, University Park, PA 16802 1.814.863.3640 (direct) || lcb11@psu.edu
Remarks delivered at the Workshop, Smart Courts in Comparative Perspective: Chinese Approaches and Global Developments, University of Cologne (7 July 2025)
Hello everyone
It is my great pleasure to be here with you today in Cologne on this splendid German summer day. My special thanks to the workshop organizers and to my friends Daniel Sprick and Bjorn Ahl for their encouragement and as the great sources of inspiration for the project around which these few words of mine are directed. And I appreciate the opportunity to consider approaches of leading states, and especially Chinese approaches, to the global movement to align the forms and functions of technology with those of the courts, to produce, in synergy something greater for both.
The global nature of this movement to align tech and courts ought to be underscored. The 2020 Strategic Plan for the U.S. Federal Judiciary speaks to the need to harness technology’s potential to “increase productive time, and facilitate work processes. . . improv[ing] access to courts, including information about cases, court facilities, and judicial processes.”[1] The European Commission speaks to the “Digitalisation of Justice” proposing a toolbox of measures to improve access to justice and efficiency.[2] By 2024, Morocco, Tanzania, and Egypt had introduced technology into their judicial framework, including A.I. driven technologies.[3] And so on.
China has given this movement a name—or at least rebranded the product of the alignment of technology and the courts. Under the rubric of “smart” courts, perhaps better in the original Chinese-- ‘Zhi Hui Fa Yuan’ (智慧法院). The name suggests an alignment on the ground that is both linguistic and textual in the operational spaces of courts. Over the last decade or so, and through its Supreme People’s Court, Chinese officials have led a national effort to modernize the judicial system through the use of emerging technologies. Like other modernization pathways elsewhere, the goals include enhancing access to justice and ensuring that access provides pathways toward just outcomes.[4] Since December 2024, these efforts also include an artificial intelligence platform to help judges improve work efficiency.[5]
But names sometimes are a distraction. And that appeared to be the case with Chinese smart courts. The name became a vessel into which people could pour their larger fears about the transformations they feared most—that the people would no longer be their own masters but would serve technology even as technology appeared to serve them. In effect, and like that glorious episode from the Twilight Zone television series of the mid 20th Century—what appeared to be the glorious innovations offered by generous space aliens, turned out to be the means by which humanity could be better prepared and managed for consumption, all in the service of a cookbook that gave humanity hope but was its doom—“To Serve Man.” The notion of innovation as a cookbook and humanity as its object is certainly old, but appears intensified when one worries about “robot courts,” and autonomous virtual analytics which, through the machinations of simulacra, might wrest all autonomy from humans and human institutions. It is no surprise, then, as Susan Finder relates in her examination of the Supreme People’s Court 2024 Work Report to the National People’s Congress, that the term “smart courts (智慧法院) appears to have been dropped.[6] But the function and object remains unchanged.
Still, as a conceptual matter, the name, in every language, is worth keeping. Its honesty rather than its precision provides a starting point for considering, in more technically precise terms, (1) what one means by technologically enhanced judicial function, and (2) provides a cognitive baseline for better embedding this amalgam of tech and state organ, into its larger environment. That focus, in turn, requires some sort of conceptual semiosis, that is a means of signifying the object “smart-court” in a way that accords with the way that society would understand the object. In this case, it requires a basis for aligning the “smart” with the “court” to produce an aggregated singularity, the smartcourt, a kneading of conceptual objects each of which remains true to themselves while creating something that is its own conceptual object removed from the kneaded objects from which it derived.
The study of “smart” or “intelligent,” or “wise” courts can be approached from a large number of perspectives. In these remarks, we will start from the ordering premise that these “smart” courts can be understood as an object, and also as a symbol or signified conception, and lastly as the set of objects and behaviors that produces its own meaning through its own dialectical phenomenology—that being by doing. This amalgamation of objects and symbols is a matter central to the continued evolution, in human society, of the notion and practice of judging, and of institutions of judging to which it is both attached and to which it lends meaning; but an object and symbol of what? Well the courts themselves have let us know worldwide.
To do that, it may be necessary to consider the essence of both parts of this subject of study in themselves and within the wider conceptual spaces which give them form and direction. My object today, then, is to think about the essence of being “smart” and of the performance of “smartness” not merely as confined to the realm of the judicial, however that term is understood and performed. Rather, my object is to consider the object-concept we can identify as “smart courts” within deeply coordinated systems in which it forms a crucial, but not necessarily, the core part. While the focus is generally on smart systems, the special focus will be on the political-economic system of China in this, its new era of historical development on its unavoidable journey along the Socialist Path toward the realization, eventually, of a communist society in and for the nation. I will speak, then, to smart systems. More than that, I will speak to smartness within highly coordinated systems in which the political leadership and guidance function has been delegated to a vanguard of social forces organized in and as a Communist Party, the Basic Line of which includes overseeing modernization that contributes to the realization of the long march on the Socialist path. To that end, it may be necessary to consider the contradictions, as Mao Zedong understood that term of developing smart administrative organs without a correspondingly smart political apparatus.
We start with the idea of “smart” or “intelligent” or “wise.” In English, the word smart derives from ancient German (schmerzen) meaning to cause pain, or to be painful, and is aligned to its Latin cognate mordere. In North American English it is also a reference to quick witted intelligence—perhaps that which bites, but earlier also suggested action or movement quickly and deftly executed. It acquired its reference to devices behaving as though guided by intelligence from the 1970s.[7] In contrast, the term intelligence, the English derived from the Latin, suggests capacity—principally the capacity to comprehend stimuli and rationalize them into something that could be understood. It references both its object (the notion of intelligence as data gathering) and the process by which it is given meaning (the faculty for understanding), as well as the meaningfulness of the meaning (the understanding or derivation of truth from facts).[8] Wisdom, on the other hand , referenced a condition rather than a capacity—it is the condition or property of being wise. To be wise is, in English, to be invested with the power of judging or discerning rightly. In its Old English sense, it incorporated the notion of awareness, and also of showing the way.[9] That sets up the tension/contradiction that is then embedded in both the aspiration and the concept. Aligning tech to courts can be understood in the sense of smartness (efficiency of execution), of intelligence (capacity to undertake an action or decision), and wisdom (the power/authority or status of judging or acting correctly). Each of these aspects is then replicated in the debates around the alignment of technology to something else—a court, a city, a phone, or a vanguard ruling party.
Similar to other languages, Chinese adds layers and nuance to the concept. One might start with the root--Zhì (智). The term is commonly translated as wisdom or intelligence (though note the two are not the same things), but also wit and resourcefulness. One might then consider two ways of thinking about intelligence or wisdom. One looks to 能 (néng) and the other to 慧 (hui). The first, 能 (néng), references ability, capacity, expertise, or skill. The second, 慧 (hui), refers to intelligence or wisdom, and especially discernment or perception. Zhìnéng (智能), then, might be understood to reference the capacity to actualize something smart or intelligent. Zhihuì (智慧), on the other hand might be better suited to reference the capacity to understand and use a thing, process or object. The first touches on capacity and its technologies. One speaks of smart phones as Zhìnéng shǒujī (智能手机), or smart appliances as zhìnéng jiādiàn (智能家电), or artificial intelligence as réngōng zhìnéng (人工智能). Here the focus is on technological capacity. The second, perhaps more on utilization through the application of moral, normative or empirical knowledge. One speaks of smart cities as zhìhuì chégshì (智慧城市), and one speaks of smart courts as Zhihui fayuàn (智慧法院) . Here the focus is on analytical capacity that includes moral, political, and spiritual elements—not the tech but the judgment is centered, one which may be expressed from out of zhinéng but requires capacity beyond tech; it requires a capacity to judge and apply (hui).
Whether that capacity remains human, or can be delegated to humanity in its virtual form remains to be seen. Within the Chinese conceptual universe, for the moment at least, the hope, expressed through text, is that collective institutions remain human—that is, that hui is an essentially human characteristic, for which other forms of intelligence lack capacity and wisdom. Smart courts are smart or intelligent in the sense of Zhihui (wisdom capacity) precisely because at its center, or perhaps as a mediating element is the individual judge, and the collective of judges. Thus, the object of wisdom, the capacity to use and not be used by technology or technological intelligence, lies with its object—the court (法院) which might in a more literal English produce the overtones of an institution or organ for law or regulation. What one can discern conceptually, then, in the smart court, is a desire for a union of technology, which is smart and intelligent, with courts, which are neither, but that may, with intelligent and smart tech, become wise(r). In its ideal form smart courts are expected to use smart and intelligent tech to enhance their capacity to make wise decisions.
For the moment, the issues are largely theoretical. Despite vast progress in the development of techno-intelligence systems and the enlargement of the capacity for the use of simulacra, in the form of descriptive and predictive modeling, to move from technical capacity to analytical capacity, the project of techno-modernization remains in its formative period. That period is marked by the realization of the potential of technology through the collection of data. Digitization, rather than digitalization, remains the crucial issue of this first era of techno-revolutionary intelligence. And that becomes evident in the resources and infrastructure still necessary to transform a sort of techno-medieval approach to the collection and storage of data, much less the construction of pathways for their use, into something like markets for raw materials. Issues of data quality, issues of producing data that may be useful across platforms, issues of ownership and control, including the power to destroy or change data, issues of the rights to exploitation, and issues of alignment with law, economic, and political systems for which data on the scale now possible was both impossible to conceive and to use in pre-tech (or analog) systems.[10] Digitalization is still currently at a primitive stage. Courts focus on virtual processes for access for filings, court hearing, records and records retention, and the like. Much of that is still data-centric. The focus remains on the harnessing of techno-processes and capacity to enhance current performances and behaviors of or in courts by reference to the perfection of pre-tech forms. Still, systems on the horizon will make it possible to use data for more sophisticated modeling, especially of caselaw, and then to rely on that modeling for guiding the work of judicial officials.
Yet the model suggests two significant contradictions, or challenges in the Western sense. The first touches on the problem for the courts—or rather for the human systems expressed in and through the courts, and thus as a signifier of all human collective organs—of technology that is no longer an instrument but becomes a driver of judicial functionality, including the function of decision making (in cases) and judicial policy (in general). The second, and perhaps more immediate, problem touches on problems for the system of Socialism with the Party at its core. More specifically it concerns the impossibilities of a “smart”, “intelligent” and “wise” state apparatus overseen by a Party apparatus that is none of those things. Here the problem is of a vanguard political organ that is functionally incapable of supervising and discipling its own administrative apparatus because it lacks “smart” or “intelligent” capacity to do so. A “smart”, “intelligent” or “wise” court and court system is rudderless if the apex political organ under and through which its establishes its own meaning and sets the parameters for its own operations is incapable of overseeing either. Let us briefly consider each in turn.
With respect to the first, the challenge for the courts, and also for other “smart” institutions, ought to concentrate on the ordering of smart tech instrumentalization (Zhinéng) and the structures for exercising wisdom (Zhihui). That is triggered where the technology moves from being “smart” to “wise,” especially where the technology develops the capacity to be intelligent, and then ultimately to develop a self-awareness sufficiently complete to be autonomous—that is to develop self-generative capacity dependent on data and analytics, to be sure, but no longer dependent on human coders, data harvesters, or humans who transform analytics into decision. Technology is already at the cusp of achieving these transformations. It is no longer merely an instrument without capacity; and through analytics, and the wonders of evolving virtual models and comprehensive simulacra of the human world through descriptive and predictive analytics, may develop an autonomous capacity for wisdom in the ancient sense of judging correctly. At its limits, the role of the human and the techno-intelligence reverses—no longer an instrument to enhance human judgment and action, it now serves as the means by which humans become the instruments of its own capacity to move humans (in disputes or through policy) toward whatever state of efficient perfection was coded into its program as the ultimate or foundational objective of its activities.
This challenge becomes acute when it is transposed to the CPC and its own necessary efforts to become a smart (Zhihui) Party through innovation in smart (Zhinéng) programs and practices. At an advanced enough level it is possible to query whether tech or people begin to drive the development of Chinse Marxist.-Leninism, and certainly the transposition of that driving -forward movement along the Socialist Path in specific policy. Much more specifically, the challenge revolves around the operational legitimacy of democratic centralism where the discussion may be either driven or enhance by or through advanced analytics and self-aware intelligence programs. The issue is a critical one where, under conditions of Chinese Marxist-Leninism, the CPC must constantly respond to changing conditions, now including the conditions of technological interventions in the processes of Party work. While the CPC must drove the overall situation within the Supreme People’s Court, within, through and with technology, the issue of who or what drives ideology in China under similar conditions.
It is at this point that the second challenge becomes threatening. Institutional hierarchies are constructed and maintained on the basis of the assumption of human control and agency. Institutions are not guided, disciplined, assessed, held accountable and managed—people are and by other people. Where techno-systems become a critical element in the operation of human systems, from digitized systems of efficiency and access oriented instruments, to more complex systems grounded in descriptive or predictive analytics, the chain of responsibility and accountability is at best disturbed, and at worst severed. That disturbance occurs both within the institution, and between the institution and its own supervisory organs up the chain of authority on social and political systems.
That hierarchical inter- and intra-penetration[11] is in turn structured within the cognitive cages of the ruling ideology. Like many innovations undertaken in China, the project of smart courts 智慧法院 comprises several parts, all of which operationalize important strands of the contemporary Basic Line of the CPC under conditions of the current general contradiction, and guided under the leadership of the CPC toward those ends. Substantial focus on smart courts tends to concentrate on their operation, and on the consequences of that operation for other, related areas of governance and policy with their own operational imperatives. In this sense, the study of smart courts focuses on functionality as a function of objectives: efficiency, justice, consistency, predictability, transparency, etc. It also focuses on the way in which smart court rules and operations may impact other rule/operation systems—data integrity, platform governance, artificial intelligence regulations and the like. These are important areas for the study of the “thing/object” itself—the smart court and its operational system. Nonetheless, the smart court system is itself the manifestation of a deep and dynamic process of interpenetration manifesting fundamental principles with Chinese characteristics. A Chinese smart court, for all its “intelligence” will serve no purpose if it is not, first, a socialist “smart court” and if that smartness (Zhinéng) is not a faithful reflection of the guidance and leadership (Zhihui) of the CPC as it is expected to be manifested in every aspect of the operation of the judicial function.
In this sense, smart courts are perhaps best signified as the dynamic manifestation of current concepts of Chinese Leninism and more particularly as the expression of the maturing vision of Chinese Leninism in its new era. That, in turn, blends two Leninist theoretical pathways—the first and better known, is the pathway towards a new era ideal of Socialist Legality or Rule of Law, the official version of which found expression in a portion of the General Secretary’s Report to the 20th CPC Congress. The second is bound up with the elements of socialist modernization, the further development of concepts of productive forces , and the incorporation of high or new quality productivity within them. Their application to the judicial system provides a space within which judicial system perfection becomes a function of the socialist modernization of law through innovation. Smart courts must be smart because the CPC has guided all of its productive assets toward the realization that new or high quality productivity is the essence of a socialist modernization. Socialist modernization, in turn, might be understood as the foundation for the overcoming of the current general contradiction of the current stage of Chinese historical development. Now the irony: tech, then, is a critical modality for this progression, the result of which may produce the great contradiction of the succeeding stage of China’s historical development, the contradiction between human and virtual direction of the nation along the Socialist Path.
This changes the focus of the contradictions and challenges of smart court development from the court and from tech to the role of the CPC and CPC authority enhancing tech. This may also be understood in two senses. The first of these touches on the leadership and guidance role of the CPC with respect to its judicial organs—serving as a sort of quality control function This operates in two important ways. One is with respect to ideological baselines that must be incorporated into the judicial practice. Both the operation of the judiciary and its product must be monitored to ensure quality in the form of adherence to the CPC’s basic line and more specifically its contemporary policy and objectives. The other is with respect to the judicial product. This may take the form of assessments around issues of the extent to which judges are applying the correct law in the correct way. To those ends, AI serves as a disciplinary and perhaps nudging mechanism. So does the penetration into the judicial function and operations of both digitization (the conversion of analog data into digital form) and its digitalization (the integration of digital technologies, including AI, into judicial operations to optimize the objectives specified by the CPC in its leadership and guidance roles). Both digitization and digitalization permits a more seamless interpenetration between the judicial and CPC functions.
The second of these focus on the CPC as the critical driver innovation in judicial structure, operation, and substance (its end product objects). This may be undertaken by CPC guidance/leadership driving principles and application of innovation in law, and in the character and cultures of the judicial function. That, in turn, may be undertaken through its oversight of the mechanisms of judicial production and of the judiciary itself. That might require a focus on the role of digitization/digitalization (perhaps especially through AI mechanisms and functions) in shaping the environment in which the judicial function operates and in the shaping of its decisions (in the aggregate). For this function to be undertaken to fuller effect, the CPC itself must undertake the sort of socialist modernization of high quality production it has developed for the courts, and to deeply integrate that digitized-digitalized capacity (including through the use of AI) in its leadership/guidance/oversight responsibilities. Smart courts require a smart vanguard with equal or superior capacity. The misalignment of these forces creates the sort of asymmetry that could produce an upending of leadership from the analog Party to the digitalized apparatus it was meant to oversee.
And thus the nature of the interpenetration and its challenges— the smart courts are both an instrument of delivering dispute resolution and law enforcement services applied to the masses and at the same time they are an instrument by which those services are shaped. In this sense, the smart court signifies the mass line, sociability modernization, and new quality production within its functionally differentiated sphere, which is, itself, an object and expression of the Socialist rule of law that it is meant to manifest. In that context, and in an analogue form, the relationship between the vanguard and its judicial apparatus could be framed and understood in traditional personal-bureaucratic forms. In that sense there was an equivalence in the apparatus of interpenetration. But that structure, balance and initial form of interpenetration acquires a quite different aspect in the face of digitization and digitalization. Technology does not change the basic objectives but does significantly alter the character and intensity of interpenetration from the judiciary to the CPC and then back again. The smart court project is effectively incomplete in the absence of a smart Party that itself can deploy the emerging technologies to more deeply integrate its administrative apparatus (and not just the courts) within its guidance framework. It is not clear that this can be done by people alone. And thus the challenge for the CPC—how to become a smart Party which drives technology but is not driven by or through it.
This brings one back to the larger issue of nature of interpenetration. Within the Chinese political-economic model there are clearly issues that are unique to it. Nonetheless, the Chinese model does provide a template for more general consideration of the nature of the challenges that digitization and digitalization pose, not just within the specific models of Chinese governance, but more generally elsewhere. The line between interpenetration and interference is one that haunts all systems (in China perhaps characterized by the line between application in a specific case to the interpretation of the law to be applied). Another is the fundamental issue of the character of digitalization—instrument or sentience. That is the way in which what appears to be an instrument serving human collective functionality in a specific field may, with predictive analytics and generative intelligence operating autonomously, become the driver the instrument of which are the courts.
That produces a third issue—the fundamental character of court production in the age of big data tech—it is possible to understand courts and their functions as a generator if data, both with respect to inputs (the claims) and outputs (the decisions) and structures (the processes and institutions through which inputs and outputs are generated and their own input/output consequences. To the extent that courts become data sources, in China for example, the role of the courts as an input for the proper operation of the mass line may become more important that the generation of output within the judicial system. In this sense big data tech may serve to instrumentalize courts as means of political/policy expression. And in that sense it may be possible to develop high quality production methods with respect to the management of democratic centralism and more generally of whole process democracy. For other systems the transformation of court cases as data sources could have similar effect, but, as one sees in the United States, perhaps driving changes in the balance between the judicial, executive and legislative roles. All of this is in the future, of course. Yet it is likely that the time to begin to consider the revolution in the delivery of judicial services from the perspective of its interpenetrative consequences and roles might not be avoided for long. What ought to be avoided, perhaps, is an insistence of treating functionally differentiated organs as isolated in their differentiation. Big data tech now makes that presupposition harder to realistically maintain, in practice or for analysis.
It is in this sense that the project of smart courts, that is, of technology enhanced judicial functioning, becomes a manifestation of the larger issues of the reassertion of the authority and guidance of the CPC within a tech infused environment in which the human has, to some extent, been displaced, and inter-tech coordination will be required as a virtual replication of the human structures that together constitute the political and administrative structures of the Chinese state around the CPC. The acuteness of the challenges for Chinese Marxist-Leninist systems may be understood in two core respects. The first looks to challenges to the operational realities of the Communist Party as the core and central element of the political-economic order. The second looks to the contradictions between (1) the imperatives of high quality productivity driving the fundamental obligation to push forward the project of Socialist modernization, an imperative that sits at the normative center of New Era Chinese Marxist-Leninism, on the one hand, and (2) the consequences of that modernization of the ability of the Communist Party to effectively lead without itself matching if not exceeding techno-driven modernization both in its own internal operations and in the mechanics of its guidance and leadership over the political apparatus of the nation—including its courts.
The second touches on “smart” or “intelligent” asymmetries among interlinked organs within political and social systems, that can destabilize or upend the ordering of that system. More specifically, a developing asymmetry between an administrative apparatus that is “smart” or “intelligent” (courts, cities and the like) and the apex holder of political authority in a Marxist-Leninist system—the Communist Party of China and its apparatus.
Let me conclude with these thoughts: Ultimately, one must come to understand, or at least consider the plausibility, of a principle that under New Era Chinese Marxist-Leninism, the state apparatus can only be as “smart,” intelligent” and “wise” as it is in the capacity and operations of the Party to do likewise. In the presence of asymmetry two fundamental contradictions must be addressed. The first is the contradiction between the leadership of the Party and its capacity to lead. The second is between the techno-instruments through which Party capacity is undertaken and the ability of the Party apparatus to steer, guide, assess, control and utilize these instruments in the performance of its own duties and responsibilities. The fundamental issue of instrumentalization and capacity remains undisturbed—the more autonomous the tech, the greater the risk that the relationship between instrument and its wielders will be reversed, at least in part. In the absence of a capacity to understand and manage those contradictions, either organs better capacitated to wield techno-instrumentalized applications and processes will drive human collective systems, or human collective systems may become an instrument through which techno-wisdom intelligence may realize its own vision for techno-human perfectibility.
[1] Judicial Conference of the United States, Strategic Plan for the Federal Judiciary (Sept. 2020), available https://www.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/federaljudiciary_strategicplan2020.pdf, last accessed 1 July 2025.
[2] COMMUNICATION FROM THE COMMISSION TO THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT, THE COUNCIL, THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COMMITTEE AND THE COMMITTEE OF THE REGIONS Digitalisation of justice in the European Union A toolbox of opportunities COM/2020/710 final (2 December 2020).
[3] Artificial Intelligence and The Future of Judicial Systems in Africa Report (2024) by the Lawyers Hub
[4] 2016 Work Report SPC
[5] Supreme People’s Court, Press Release: “China launches artificial intelligence platform to boost judicial efficiency,” available https://english.court.gov.cn/2024-12/05/c_1053706.htm, last accessed 1 July 2025 (“Zhang Chengbing, another official from the People's Court Press, said . . . "The platform can analyze and compare information from a large number of electronic files, with a quicker response to catch key points and extract outlines, so as to further improve judicial efficiency," he explained.”).
[6] Susan Finder, “What’s New in the 2024 SPC Report to the NPC (28 May 2024), available https://supremepeoplescourtmonitor.com/tag/npc-work-report/, last accessed 1 July 2025.
[7] See Etymology Online “Smart” available https://www.etymonline.com/word/smart; Oxford English dictionary online, available https://www.oed.com/dictionary/smart_adj?tl=true#22355876.
[8] Etymology online, intelligence, available https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=intelligent.
[9] Etymology online, wise, wisdom, available https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=wise; see also OECD, available https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=wise.
[10] In Europe, see, e.g., CASE OF SHIPS WASTE OIL COLLECTOR B.V. AND OTHERS v. THE NETHERLANDS
App. No(s). 2799/16; 2800/16; 3124/16; 3205/16 (1 April 2025); available https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng#{%22itemid%22:[%22001-242521%22]} .
[11] Interpenetration here is understood in multiple senses—as perichoresis (περιχώρησις) from the Christian engagement with the relationship among the three elements of the Christian Trinity; as "perfect interfusion" (yuanrong, 圓融) from Huayan school (華嚴) of Buddhism and focusing on the phenomenology of reality grounded in mutual containment and consequential permeability of Dharmadhatu ( 法界) the realm of objects and action; as structural coupling in systems theory among deeply intertwined subsystems in dynamic and hierarchical arrangements; in Marxist-Leninist principles of the four Cardinal Principles operationalized within concepts of the mass line, democratic centralism, and people’s democratic dictatorship; and in the fundamental concepts of object-signification-interpretation within semiotics and its phenomenological interplay. ,
.
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