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I have been writing about education in China through the lens of Socialist or "Chinese Style" Modernization, what I call the semiotic meta-signifier of the Chinese cognitive Lebenswelt. See (1) "Modernization (现代化) as the Lebenswelt of Chinese Constitutionalism" [现代化作为中国宪政的生活世界 ]); (2) "Education as Productive Force and Ideological Apparatus: A Dialectical Analysis of China's Modernization-Driven Knowledge System" [作为生产力与意识形态机制的教育：中国现代化驱动型知识体系的辩证分析]; and (3) Reflections on 张冠梓: 从世界历史纵深把握中国式现代化的时代价值 [Zhang Guanzi, Grasping the Contemporary Value of Chinese Modernization from the Depth of World History ]--The Marxist Variation on Leninism and the Constitution/Realization of Modernization.
Its current forms have had a long arc of development during the time of the leadership of the current General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (see eg (1) Legal and Political Education With Chinese Characteristics (通过法学院将法律教育专业化，通过政策学院将政治教育制度化) (2013) and (2) Focusing on Civic Education in China--The CCP's Ideological Work Comes to the Universities: 关于进一步加强和改进新形势下高校宣传思想工作的意见 (2015).
These reflections provide an analytic foundation for reading 《中央宣传部、司法部关于开展法治宣传教育的第九个五年规划（2026－2030年）》["Ninth Five-Year Plan for Legal Publicity and Education (2026-2030)"] which was released at the end of July 2026. The 9th Five-Year Plan for Legal Publicity and Education (2026-2030) was forwarded on July 27, 2026 by the CPC Central Committee and the State
Council jointly issued by the Publicity Department of the CPC Central
Committee and the Ministry of Justice. The plan covers the period 2026–2030 and
sets out a comprehensive framework for nationwide legal education. Below is a
neutral summary of its principal contents.
The plan identifies legal-system public education as a long-term foundational element of China's strategy of comprehensive governance according to law. It aims to foster a society-wide culture of respecting, studying, observing, and applying the law. By 2030, the plan envisions measurable improvements in the legal literacy of citizens and leading cadres, deeper integration of legal education with governance and law-enforcement practice, and fuller implementation of the principle that every law-enforcing body bears responsibility for public legal education.
Section II introduces a central pillar of the plan, which is the dissemination of XiJinping Thought on the Rule of Law. This includes building a national instructor pool, developing standardized courses, and incorporating the doctrine into Party training programs and all levels of formal education—from primary school through university law programs. The plan also calls for strengthened international communication of this framework, including through academic forums and multilateral dialogues, to present China's rule-of-law narrative abroad.
Section II (Constitutional and Legal Publicity) mandates intensified publicity across five areas:
· The Constitution, with emphasis on key groups (cadres, civil servants, youth) and activities such as National Constitution Day, as well as publicity related to the Basic Laws of Hong Kong and Macao and the Anti-Secession Law.
· Laws supporting high-quality development, covering the business environment, the private economy, rural revitalization, the digital and platform economies, financial regulation, intellectual property, and foreign trade and investment.
· National security and social stability, encompassing the holistic national-security concept, patriotic education, defense, social governance, dispute resolution, criminal law, cybersecurity, counterespionage, emergency response, ethnic unity, and religious affairs.
· People's livelihoods and environmental protection, including the Civil Code, cultural heritage, consumer protection, personal information security, anti-fraud measures, internet governance, and the Ecological and Environmental Code.
· Intra-Party regulations, integrating Party disciplinary rules into routine cadre and member training.
Section IV (Lifelong Legal Education for Citizens) establishes a system of lifelong legal education organized into four tracks:
1. General public — mass campaigns to build rule consciousness and contractual awareness, with development of citizen legal-literacy benchmarks.Section V (Targeted and Technology-Driven Approaches) calls for a shift toward precision legal education driven by big data, using government, judicial, and internet-enterprise data to identify knowledge gaps and tailor content to specific populations. It promotes new dissemination formats—short videos, animation, mini-dramas—and the integration of legal-education elements into cultural tourism, sporting events, and traditional festivals. It also endorses the use of artificial intelligence for content generation and distribution, and the construction of a national "Digital-Intelligence Legal Education" platform linked to existing judicial databases.
2. Cadres and state employees — legal testing in recruitment, mandatory legal-knowledge lists for leading cadres, and requirements for officials to observe court proceedings and deliver rule-of-law lectures.
3. Youth — classroom-based legal education coordinated with families and society, revision of the national youth legal-education outline, full deployment of deputy principals for legal affairs in schools, and establishment of "Parents' Rule-of-Law Classrooms."
4. Specific social groups — tailored programs for private entrepreneurs, platform-economy workers, women, the elderly, persons with disabilities, rural migrants, village cadres, media practitioners, internet users, Chinese citizens and enterprises abroad, and foreign nationals residing in China.
Section VI (Socialist Rule-of-Law Culture)devotes a section to cultural development, including the preservation of "red" (revolutionary) rule-of-law heritage, the study and digitization of traditional Chinese legal culture, the creation of rule-of-law cultural products and brands, and the establishment and maintenance of a directory of physical and online rule-of-law cultural venues.
Section VII (Institutional and Systemic Improvements) seeks to strengthen the institutional framework for legal education through several mechanisms:
The plan simultaneously instantiates the system's theoretical architecture and demonstrates the recursive logic of that system: legal education is both a productive force developing citizens' legal consciousness and itself a productive force subject to the high-quality development imperative—the system applying its own modernization logic to itself.
· Full implementation of the "whoever enforces the law is responsible for legal education" principle, extended to "whoever manages" and "whoever provides services."Lastly, Section VIII (Organizational Implementation) directs local Party committees and governments at or above the county level to incorporate legal education into their rule-of-law construction plans and allocate necessary funding. People's congresses are tasked with oversight, and judicial-administrative departments serve as the lead coordinating bodies. Mid-term and final evaluations of the plan's implementation are required, with an explicit instruction to emphasize practical results and avoid formalism. The military is directed to arrange its own legal-education work in accordance with the plan.
· Integration of legal education into every stage of the legislative and judicial process, including case-based public education.
· Requirements for news media and internet platforms—especially large platforms—to maintain dedicated public-interest legal-education content and provide preferential traffic for authoritative legal commentary on prominent cases.
· Expansion of the "Legally Informed Person" program, aiming for at least five trained individuals per qualifying village or community, plus a national online training school and a volunteer corps drawn from legal professionals and law students.
· Risk-control measures to prevent the dissemination of erroneous legal interpretations, with particular attention to self-media accounts.
The plan simultaneously instantiates the system's theoretical architecture and demonstrates the recursive logic of that system: legal education is both a productive force developing citizens' legal consciousness and itself a productive force subject to the high-quality development imperative—the system applying its own modernization logic to itself.
1. The Plan as a Third-Level Encoding of Political Line. In "Education as Productive Force and Ideological Apparatus" I identify a four-level naturalization model through which contradictions detected in social reality are processed into doctrinal formation: (1) contradiction detection via the mass line, (2) political-line formulation through democratic centralism, (3) encoding of political line into institutional form through law, regulation, and programmatic statements, and (4) implementation through governance practice and subject-formation. The Ninth Five-Year Plan is, in these terms, a paradigmatic instance of third-level encoding. It takes the political line formulated at the 20th Party Congress, the Third and Fourth Plenums, and the broader doctrinal architecture of Xi Jinping Thought on the Rule of Law, and translates that line into operational institutional structures—specific targets, mechanisms, responsible bodies, evaluation criteria, and temporal parameters. The plan does not merely restate doctrine; it converts it into the "binding force of institutional structure" which can be understood as a hallmark of the encoding stage.
2. Legal Education as Differentiated Ideological Production. A central thesis of "Education as Productive Force and Ideological Apparatus" is that China's educational apparatus operates through five structurally distinct modalities—school education, mass education, social education, cultural education, and patriotic education—each constituting a different mode of ideological production with its own audiences, methods, temporal rhythms, and positions on what Backer terms the "faith-reason spectrum". The Ninth Five-Year Plan activates all five modalities simultaneously with respect to the single domain of legal consciousness:
School/formal education is addressed in the plan's provisions requiring the incorporation of Xi Jinping Thought on the Rule of Law into curricula at all levels from primary school through university, including required courses in law programs, the compilation of standardized textbooks, and the appointment of deputy principals for legal affairs. These provisions correspond to what I call "sequential processing with staged validation"—the plan embeds legal-ideological content into the credentialing pipeline through which all students must pass.
Mass/popular education is addressed through the plan's provisions for broad-coverage legal publicity campaigns, the "whoever enforces the law is responsible for legal education" principle, and the targeting of the entire population through media, internet platforms, and community-level programming. The plan's call for "precision analysis" using big data to identify public knowledge gaps mirrors mass education's "broadcast with sectoral filtering" character—a single signal transmitted to all receivers but decoded into different behavioral outputs depending on the audience.
Social education is reflected in the plan's extensive provisions for workplace-embedded legal training directed at specific professional groups: enterprise managers, platform-economy workers, village cadres, media practitioners, internet service providers, and Chinese citizens operating abroad. Social education can be understood as operating through "specialized co-processors for domain-specific tasks," and the plan's meticulous differentiation of legal-education content by occupational category fits this description precisely.
Cultural education appears in the plan's Section VI on "Promoting the Flourishing Development of Socialist Rule-of-Law Culture," which addresses the creation of rule-of-law cultural products, the preservation of "red rule-of-law heritage," the integration of legal elements into cultural tourism and traditional festivals, and the establishment of rule-of-law cultural venues. Here one encounters cultural education as operating through "ambient conditioning"—not the transmission of discrete propositions but the establishment of environmental parameters within which all other processing occurs. The plan's embedding of legal themes into the cultural landscape is a textbook illustration of this modality.
Patriotic education is the most pervasive modality within the plan. The primacy of Xi Jinping Thought on the Rule of Law, the centrality of constitutional publicity, the emphasis on national security and the Anti-Secession Law, and the explicit framing of legal education as serving "Chinese-style modernization" all position the plan within what Backer terms the "operating system" layer—the foundational normative orientation upon which all other educational activities depend. Patriotic education "produces the subject-position from which all other education becomes meaningful" ("Education as Productive Force and Ideological Apparatus" ). The plan's insistence that legal consciousness be grounded in love of country, commitment to Party leadership, and identification with the national rejuvenation project is not incidental but structurally necessary within the system's architecture.
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Mass/popular education is addressed through the plan's provisions for broad-coverage legal publicity campaigns, the "whoever enforces the law is responsible for legal education" principle, and the targeting of the entire population through media, internet platforms, and community-level programming. The plan's call for "precision analysis" using big data to identify public knowledge gaps mirrors mass education's "broadcast with sectoral filtering" character—a single signal transmitted to all receivers but decoded into different behavioral outputs depending on the audience.
Social education is reflected in the plan's extensive provisions for workplace-embedded legal training directed at specific professional groups: enterprise managers, platform-economy workers, village cadres, media practitioners, internet service providers, and Chinese citizens operating abroad. Social education can be understood as operating through "specialized co-processors for domain-specific tasks," and the plan's meticulous differentiation of legal-education content by occupational category fits this description precisely.
Cultural education appears in the plan's Section VI on "Promoting the Flourishing Development of Socialist Rule-of-Law Culture," which addresses the creation of rule-of-law cultural products, the preservation of "red rule-of-law heritage," the integration of legal elements into cultural tourism and traditional festivals, and the establishment of rule-of-law cultural venues. Here one encounters cultural education as operating through "ambient conditioning"—not the transmission of discrete propositions but the establishment of environmental parameters within which all other processing occurs. The plan's embedding of legal themes into the cultural landscape is a textbook illustration of this modality.
Patriotic education is the most pervasive modality within the plan. The primacy of Xi Jinping Thought on the Rule of Law, the centrality of constitutional publicity, the emphasis on national security and the Anti-Secession Law, and the explicit framing of legal education as serving "Chinese-style modernization" all position the plan within what Backer terms the "operating system" layer—the foundational normative orientation upon which all other educational activities depend. Patriotic education "produces the subject-position from which all other education becomes meaningful" ("Education as Productive Force and Ideological Apparatus" ). The plan's insistence that legal consciousness be grounded in love of country, commitment to Party leadership, and identification with the national rejuvenation project is not incidental but structurally necessary within the system's architecture.
3. The Metasignifier of Modernization. In "Modernization (现代化) as the Lebenswelt of Chinese Constitutionalism" I argue that modernization functions as a "metasignifier"—the horizon of intelligibility within which all political, economic, cultural, and educational phenomena acquire meaning. The Ninth Five-Year Plan is explicitly organized around this metasignifier. Its General Requirements section declares the plan's purpose as creating "a favorable legal environment for comprehensively promoting the building of a strong nation and the great cause of national rejuvenation through Chinese-style modernization." Every category of law publicized in the plan—from the business environment and the digital economy to financial regulation, national security, and ecological protection—is framed as serving the modernization imperative. The plan does not present legal education as an autonomous professional domain pursuing its own internal logic; it presents it as a functional element within the broader project of Chinese-style modernization, subject to the same normalization parameters that Backer identifies across the entire educational apparatus.
4. Legal Education as Productive Force. The Ninth Five-Year Plan can be understood as an institutional crystallization of this imperative, noting that it "establishes specific targets, mechanisms, and evaluation criteria for the production and dissemination of legal knowledge as a form of high-quality ideological output". The plan does not merely prescribe what legal knowledge should be transmitted; it establishes quality standards for the transmission process itself—the pedagogical methods, assessment instruments, and institutional arrangements through which legal consciousness is produced must meet standards of quality and innovation.
This analysis is strengthened by the plan's provisions on technological modernization of legal education. The mandated "Digital-Intelligence Legal Education" platform, the use of AI for content generation and distribution, and the integration of big-data-driven precision targeting all reflect what Backer calls the system's "computational metaphor becoming literal". Legal education is thereby treated not merely as a domain of ideological transmission but as a productive force that must itself be modernized—the recursive structure might be understood as a hallmark of the Third Plenum's innovation.
5. The Faith-Reason Spectrum in Legal Education. On one hand, the plan addresses the "reason" dimension: the production of technically competent legal professionals who can navigate complex regulatory frameworks in finance, international trade, intellectual property, and dispute resolution. These provisions correspond to the functional demands that "impose constraints upon ideological intervention that operate independently of (though never in contradiction to) the constraints imposed by the fundamental political line" ("Education as Productive Force and Ideological Apparatus" ).
On the other hand, the plan equally addresses the "faith" dimension: legal education must be grounded in Xi Jinping Thought on the Rule of Law, must serve the holistic national-security concept, must promote patriotism, and must be conducted within the boundaries established by ideological correctness. It frames legal education as "explicitly patriotic education grounded in ideological correctness," requiring that the autonomous knowledge system for law serve both "reason" (technically competent legal professionals) and "faith" (ideologically aligned subjects committed to socialist rule of law) ("Education as Productive Force and Ideological Apparatus" ).
On the other hand, the plan equally addresses the "faith" dimension: legal education must be grounded in Xi Jinping Thought on the Rule of Law, must serve the holistic national-security concept, must promote patriotism, and must be conducted within the boundaries established by ideological correctness. It frames legal education as "explicitly patriotic education grounded in ideological correctness," requiring that the autonomous knowledge system for law serve both "reason" (technically competent legal professionals) and "faith" (ideologically aligned subjects committed to socialist rule of law) ("Education as Productive Force and Ideological Apparatus" ).
6. The "Whoever Enforces the Law" Principle as Distributed Production. The plan's cornerstone institutional mechanism—"whoever enforces the law is responsible for legal education," extended to "whoever manages is responsible" and "whoever provides services is responsible"—is a concrete instance of what Backer theorizes as ideology produced through circulation rather than merely transmitted from a central source. This principle distributes legal-education responsibility across every state organ, enterprise, and social organization, making each institutional actor a co-producer of legal consciousness rather than a passive recipient of centrally formulated doctrine. The system achieves "coherent ideological production at scale without either collapsing into rigid uniformity or dissolving into incoherent fragmentation" precisely through this mechanism of distributed production under shared normalization parameters.
It is worth considering this in more detail. The principle 谁执法谁普法 ("whoever enforces the law is responsible for legal education") is the plan's primary mechanism for distributing responsibility for legal-consciousness production across the entire state apparatus rather than concentrating it in a single ministry. The plan operationalizes it through several interlocking institutional devices.
Responsibility lists. The plan mandates that every state organ maintain a formal "responsibility list" (普法责任清单) specifying that organ's concrete legal-education obligations. This is not a general exhortation but an administrative requirement: each organ must identify which laws it enforces and what corresponding publicity it must produce. The fulfillment of these obligations is then incorporated into two evaluation instruments—reports on rule-of-law government construction and the year-end rule-of-law accountability statements (述法) of principal heads of local Party and government organs at the municipal and county levels. The effect is to make legal-education performance a reviewable component of cadre assessment, tying it to the career consequences that the system's evaluation architecture imposes.
Extension beyond enforcement. The plan does not stop at "whoever enforces." It extends the logic to "whoever manages is responsible for legal education" (谁管理谁普法) and "whoever provides services is responsible for legal education" (谁服务谁普法). This triple formula distributes the legal-education function across all institutional actors that interact with the public in any governance capacity—not only courts and police but regulatory agencies, service providers, mass organizations, industry associations, grassroots self-governance bodies, legal service institutions, and enterprises. In Backer's terms, this transforms legal education from a centrally broadcast signal into a distributed production process in which "editors, cadres, researchers, teachers, and students are not merely passive recipients of a fixed doctrine but active co-producers within a system of differentiated ideological production".
Integration with legislative and judicial process. The plan goes further by embedding legal education into the full lifecycle of lawmaking and law enforcement. It mandates publicity and interpretation throughout the entire legislative process—initiation, drafting, review, deliberation, promulgation, and implementation—and requires that administrative enforcement and judicial documents include legal reasoning and explanation. Guidelines are to be formulated for conducting legal-system public education throughout the entire process of case handling. Exemplary cases published by administrative, supervisory, and judicial organs, together with open judicial review and hearing procedures, constitute what the plan calls "case-based legal education" (以案普法). This operationalizes the principle not as an add-on to governance but as an embedded function: every act of law enforcement or adjudication simultaneously produces legal consciousness.
Accountability mechanisms. The plan establishes a system of "legal-education reminders and accountability" (普法提示和责任追究), under which judicial-administrative agencies issue formal prompts to organs that are falling short and pursue accountability when obligations remain unfulfilled. This creates what Backer's framework would identify as an error-detection mechanism within the feedback loop—a means of identifying where the distributed production system is failing to produce adequate outputs and applying corrective pressure.
Coordinated military-civilian extension. The plan also calls for exploring "coordinated mechanisms for inter-departmental and military-civilian legal education" (部门普法、军地普法协同联动机制), extending the distributed-responsibility principle across the civil-military boundary.
In sum, the plan does not treat legal education as the project of a single dedicated bureaucracy. It converts every enforcement act, every management decision, and every service interaction into an occasion for legal-consciousness production, and it backstops this distributed architecture with accountability instruments that monitor whether each node in the network is performing its assigned function. Backer's analysis of mass education as operating through "the Party's capillary presence in every social unit" applies here: the "whoever enforces" principle makes every state organ a legal-education delivery node within a capillary network of juridical consciousness production.
Responsibility lists. The plan mandates that every state organ maintain a formal "responsibility list" (普法责任清单) specifying that organ's concrete legal-education obligations. This is not a general exhortation but an administrative requirement: each organ must identify which laws it enforces and what corresponding publicity it must produce. The fulfillment of these obligations is then incorporated into two evaluation instruments—reports on rule-of-law government construction and the year-end rule-of-law accountability statements (述法) of principal heads of local Party and government organs at the municipal and county levels. The effect is to make legal-education performance a reviewable component of cadre assessment, tying it to the career consequences that the system's evaluation architecture imposes.
Extension beyond enforcement. The plan does not stop at "whoever enforces." It extends the logic to "whoever manages is responsible for legal education" (谁管理谁普法) and "whoever provides services is responsible for legal education" (谁服务谁普法). This triple formula distributes the legal-education function across all institutional actors that interact with the public in any governance capacity—not only courts and police but regulatory agencies, service providers, mass organizations, industry associations, grassroots self-governance bodies, legal service institutions, and enterprises. In Backer's terms, this transforms legal education from a centrally broadcast signal into a distributed production process in which "editors, cadres, researchers, teachers, and students are not merely passive recipients of a fixed doctrine but active co-producers within a system of differentiated ideological production".
Integration with legislative and judicial process. The plan goes further by embedding legal education into the full lifecycle of lawmaking and law enforcement. It mandates publicity and interpretation throughout the entire legislative process—initiation, drafting, review, deliberation, promulgation, and implementation—and requires that administrative enforcement and judicial documents include legal reasoning and explanation. Guidelines are to be formulated for conducting legal-system public education throughout the entire process of case handling. Exemplary cases published by administrative, supervisory, and judicial organs, together with open judicial review and hearing procedures, constitute what the plan calls "case-based legal education" (以案普法). This operationalizes the principle not as an add-on to governance but as an embedded function: every act of law enforcement or adjudication simultaneously produces legal consciousness.
Accountability mechanisms. The plan establishes a system of "legal-education reminders and accountability" (普法提示和责任追究), under which judicial-administrative agencies issue formal prompts to organs that are falling short and pursue accountability when obligations remain unfulfilled. This creates what Backer's framework would identify as an error-detection mechanism within the feedback loop—a means of identifying where the distributed production system is failing to produce adequate outputs and applying corrective pressure.
Coordinated military-civilian extension. The plan also calls for exploring "coordinated mechanisms for inter-departmental and military-civilian legal education" (部门普法、军地普法协同联动机制), extending the distributed-responsibility principle across the civil-military boundary.
In sum, the plan does not treat legal education as the project of a single dedicated bureaucracy. It converts every enforcement act, every management decision, and every service interaction into an occasion for legal-consciousness production, and it backstops this distributed architecture with accountability instruments that monitor whether each node in the network is performing its assigned function. Backer's analysis of mass education as operating through "the Party's capillary presence in every social unit" applies here: the "whoever enforces" principle makes every state organ a legal-education delivery node within a capillary network of juridical consciousness production.
7. Mechanisms Proposed to Measure Improvements in Citizens' and Cadres' Legal Literacy by 2030. The plan's 2030 targets—continuous improvement in "the ability and level of leading cadres to handle affairs according to law" and in "the legal literacy of citizens"—are programmatic aspirations. The measurement mechanisms the plan proposes are a combination of newly created instruments, existing evaluation frameworks repurposed for legal-education assessment, and structural embedding of legal-knowledge testing into career and governance processes.
Citizen legal-literacy baseline and indicator system. The plan's most direct measurement commitment is the mandate to "research and establish a baseline and evaluation indicator system for citizens' legal literacy" (公民法治素养基准和测评指标体系). This is a new instrument to be developed during the plan period. It contemplates both a defined standard (what citizens should know and be able to do with respect to the law) and a measurement apparatus (how to test whether citizens meet that standard). The plan does not specify the indicators in detail—this is delegated to the research process—but the language signals an intention to move from qualitative aspiration to quantifiable benchmarks.
Cadre-specific assessment instruments. For state employees and leading cadres, the plan deploys multiple measurement mechanisms already embedded in the governance system:
Citizen legal-literacy baseline and indicator system. The plan's most direct measurement commitment is the mandate to "research and establish a baseline and evaluation indicator system for citizens' legal literacy" (公民法治素养基准和测评指标体系). This is a new instrument to be developed during the plan period. It contemplates both a defined standard (what citizens should know and be able to do with respect to the law) and a measurement apparatus (how to test whether citizens meet that standard). The plan does not specify the indicators in detail—this is delegated to the research process—but the language signals an intention to move from qualitative aspiration to quantifiable benchmarks.
Cadre-specific assessment instruments. For state employees and leading cadres, the plan deploys multiple measurement mechanisms already embedded in the governance system:
-Recruitment examinations: The plan mandates improvement of systems for "testing legal knowledge in the recruitment of state employees" (录用考法), making legal literacy a gatekeeping criterion for entry into state service.
-Routine legal-study systems: State employees are subject to "routine legal study" (日常学法) requirements incorporated into education and training plans, with completion presumably tracked through institutional reporting.
-Mandatory knowledge lists: The plan calls for full implementation of "the list system for intra-Party regulations and national laws and regulations that leading cadres are expected to know and understand" (应知应会党内法规和法律法规清单制度). This establishes a defined corpus of legal knowledge against which individual cadres' competence can be assessed.
-Court observation and litigation participation: State employees are required to observe court proceedings (旁听庭审), and heads of administrative agencies must appear in court to respond to lawsuits (行政机关负责人出庭应诉). These are behavioral indicators: the system measures not only what cadres know but whether they participate in legal processes.
-Comprehensive rule-of-law evaluation mechanisms: The plan calls for improvement of "comprehensive rule-of-law evaluation work mechanisms" (综合性法治评价工作机制) to "raise the legal literacy and ability of leading cadres to handle affairs according to law." This signals an integrated assessment framework evaluating cadres' legal competence as part of their overall performance review.
-Routine legal-study systems: State employees are subject to "routine legal study" (日常学法) requirements incorporated into education and training plans, with completion presumably tracked through institutional reporting.
-Mandatory knowledge lists: The plan calls for full implementation of "the list system for intra-Party regulations and national laws and regulations that leading cadres are expected to know and understand" (应知应会党内法规和法律法规清单制度). This establishes a defined corpus of legal knowledge against which individual cadres' competence can be assessed.
-Court observation and litigation participation: State employees are required to observe court proceedings (旁听庭审), and heads of administrative agencies must appear in court to respond to lawsuits (行政机关负责人出庭应诉). These are behavioral indicators: the system measures not only what cadres know but whether they participate in legal processes.
-Comprehensive rule-of-law evaluation mechanisms: The plan calls for improvement of "comprehensive rule-of-law evaluation work mechanisms" (综合性法治评价工作机制) to "raise the legal literacy and ability of leading cadres to handle affairs according to law." This signals an integrated assessment framework evaluating cadres' legal competence as part of their overall performance review.
Institutional reporting and plan evaluation. The plan mandates that fulfillment of legal-education responsibilities be incorporated into reports on rule-of-law government construction and into the year-end rule-of-law accountability statements of principal Party and government heads at the municipal and county levels. These reporting mechanisms generate data on institutional compliance that can serve as proxy indicators for system-wide progress. Additionally, the plan requires mid-term and final evaluations of the plan's own implementation—creating two structured assessment points (approximately 2028 and 2030) at which aggregate progress can be measured.
Big-data-driven dynamic assessment. The plan's provisions on precision targeting through big data (discussed in detail in section 3 below) have a measurement dimension: by "dynamically identifying public demands for legal-system public education and areas of weakness in legal literacy," the system creates a continuous monitoring apparatus that can track changes in legal-literacy indicators over time.
Nonetheless, one might approach these measurement mechanisms with caution. One can identify a structural problem inherent in all evaluation within the Chinese system: "the standard against which performance is measured is itself a product of the system being measured". When the plan proposes to establish a citizen legal-literacy baseline, the criteria defining "legal literacy" will inevitably be shaped by the ideological parameters within which the plan itself operates—producing "productive recursion" rather than independent verification. The system measures legal literacy by standards it has itself defined, and improvements in legal literacy as measured by those standards may reflect genuine cognitive and behavioral change, or they may reflect the system's progressive refinement of standards to match the outputs it is already producing. Here one might explicitly acknowledge that "[w]hether the system actually produces the subjects it claims to produce—whether graduates genuinely exhibit the 'comprehensive development' that policy mandates, whether ideological education actually generates durable commitment or merely surface compliance—remains unverified" by structural analysis alone" ("Education as Productive Force and Ideological Apparatus" ).
中央宣传部、司法部负责人就《关于开展法治宣传教育的第九个五年规划（2026－2030年）》答记者问 Officials from the Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee and the Ministry of Justice Answer Questions from Reporters on the "Ninth Five-Year Plan for Legal Publicity and Education (2026-2030)" , which follows below, suggests the Central Authorities explanation for the Plan. It follows below. The official press conference Q&A (答记者问) published on the Ministry of Justice website on July 31, 2026, in which senior officials of the Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee and the Ministry of Justice answer journalists' questions about the Ninth Five-Year Plan adds several dimensions to the analysis that the plan text alone does not provide.
Historical Legitimation and Institutional Continuity. The Q&A's first question—"Why formulate a ninth plan when eight have already been completed?"—elicits a revealing self-characterization of the legal-education enterprise. The officials frame the forty-year history of five-year legal-education planning (dating from 1986) as "a great pioneering achievement in the history of human rule of law" (人类法治史上的一大创举), arguing that "in a country of such enormous population scale, continuously conducting universal legal education, putting the law in the hands of the people, and allowing the people to have faith in the rule of law" demonstrates "the superiority of the socialist system with Chinese characteristics".
In terms of the working paper's framework, this framing is significant. It suggests the "sedimentary ontology of doctrinal formation" in which each era's contributions accumulate upon prior layers rather than replacing them ("Modernization (现代化) as the Lebenswelt of Chinese Constitutionalism"). The Q&A explicitly performs this sedimentation: the Ninth Plan is presented not as a fresh departure but as the latest stratum in an unbroken sequence of eight predecessors, each building on the achievements of the last. The officials' listing of those cumulative achievements—in-depth study of the Constitution and the socialist legal system, flourishing rule-of-law culture, widespread implementation of the "whoever enforces the law" principle, and "markedly enhanced" societal rule-of-law awareness—constitutes a retrospective validation of the entire forty-year program, establishing the base upon which the Ninth Plan is deposited.
The Q&A also identifies the statutory basis for the new plan: the Law on Legal-System Public Education (法治宣传教育法) now requires the state to compile a national legal-education plan. This is a notable juridical development: what had been a policy practice since 1986 has been elevated to a statutory obligation. In my four-level naturalization model, this represents a passage from the governance-implementation level (level 4) back up to the institutional-encoding level (level 3)—the practice of five-year legal-education planning is itself being encoded into law, hardening a policy convention into a legal requirement.
Self-Characterization of Novelty: What Officials Identify as New. Question 5 asks directly how the Ninth Plan differs from the preceding eight. The officials' answer identifies three principal innovations:
The "lifelong legal education for citizens" system (公民终身法治教育制度). The officials present this as a deepening that goes beyond the traditional focus on state employees and youth. They specifically highlight the extension of legal education to enterprise managers, workers in new forms of employment (新就业形态劳动者), and internet users (网民). This confirms the analysis advanced in the prior discussion: the plan's Section IV is not merely a continuation of existing practice but a structural expansion of the addressable population, bringing groups that had previously fallen outside the primary targets of legal-education campaigns—particularly platform-economy workers and the digital public—within the system's formal reach.The Institutional Work-System: A Condensed Official Interpretation. Question 6 asks about the plan's work-system provisions. The officials' answer provides a condensed official reading of Section VII that confirms the structural architecture identified in the prior analysis. They emphasize four elements: (a) full implementation of the "whoever enforces the law" responsibility system, (b) integration of legal education with law-based governance and rule-of-law practice, (c) an institutional system for media and internet-provider public-interest legal education, and (d) guided and regulated participation by social forces. They also address risk-prevention mechanisms.
The "precision legal education" model (精准开展法治宣传教育新模式). The officials frame this in terms of three sub-dimensions: grasping new demands, exploring new methods, and expanding new platforms. This confirms that the big-data and AI provisions discussed in the prior analysis are not ancillary details but are officially regarded as one of the plan's defining innovations. The officials' characterization—"empowering the precision of legal-system public education from three dimensions" (从把握新需求、探索新方式、拓展新平台三个方面赋能法治宣传教育精准性)—positions technology-driven targeting as a structural upgrade to the system's operational architecture.
The flourishing development of socialist rule-of-law culture (繁荣发展社会主义法治文化). The officials specifically highlight the excavation and preservation of "red rule-of-law culture" and "outstanding traditional Chinese legal culture," as well as the strengthening of "new-era integrity culture" (新时代廉洁文化). One might be persuaded that this represents the cultural-education modality in operation: the plan is not only transmitting legal propositions (the school-education function) or mobilizing the population around legal themes (the mass-education function) but actively constructing the ambient cultural environment within which legal consciousness is formed—what I call "ambient conditioning" rather than "the transmission of discrete signals" ("Modernization (现代化) as the Lebenswelt of Chinese Constitutionalism").
The officials then restate the organizational-implementation requirements: local Party committees and governments at or above the county level must incorporate legal-education work into their rule-of-law construction plans and key priorities (spiritual civilization, Peaceful China initiative, rule-of-law inspections); people's congresses at all levels must exercise oversight; judicial-administrative departments serve as the lead coordinating bodies; and mid-term and final evaluations must be conducted.
What the Q&A Adds to the Analysis
The Q&A adds three things that the plan text alone does not fully provide:
First, an explicit hierarchy of innovation. The plan text presents its provisions without formal ranking; the Q&A isolates the three innovations the drafters themselves consider most significant. This is analytically valuable because it reveals the system's own self-understanding of where it has departed from prior practice. The fact that "precision legal education" (the technology-driven model) is ranked as one of only three headline innovations—alongside the lifelong-education system and rule-of-law cultural development—confirms that the digital-transformation provisions are not decorative but structurally central to the plan's design logic.
Second, a legitimation narrative. The Q&A situates the plan within a forty-year history presented as cumulative success, frames it as a statutory obligation under the new Law on Legal-System Public Education, and positions it as serving the 15th Five-Year Plan period's developmental objectives and the overarching project of "Chinese-style modernization." In my terminology, this press conference performs precisely the mass-education function his paper describes: it "mobilizes the population's capacity to identify" the plan "within the horizon of modernization," translating a technical policy document into a narrative of historical achievement and civilizational ambition. The press conference is itself an instance of the legal-education system it describes—officials explaining the plan to journalists is simultaneously an act of legal-publicity production.
Third, a drafting-process disclosure. The officials note that the plan was drafted from "the first half of 2025" onward, on the basis of "in-depth research and broad solicitation of opinions" (深入调研、广泛征求意见). This detail is significant for a mass-line analysis: it indicates that the plan was not produced by fiat but through a consultative process that, in the system's self-description, instantiates the mass-line methodology of "from the masses, to the masses". The detected "contradictions"—gaps in legal literacy, emerging populations outside the traditional legal-education framework, technological disruption of information environments—were processed through deliberation and produced as a plan that is then returned to the population as education. The Q&A thereby provides evidence of a recursive circuit: contradiction → diagnosis → political line → institutional encoding → governance implementation → new contradiction ("Modernization (现代化) as the Lebenswelt of Chinese Constitutionalism").
