Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No. 3, 2023

 

A Systemic Interpretation of Social Rights in the Chinese Constitution

(Abstract)

 

Liu Han

 

The provisions on social rights in the Chinese Constitution cannot be understood in isolation, nor can they be interpreted simply by referring to the concepts of positive rights or social and economic rights in traditional constitutional theory. A systematic interpretation of the Chinese Constitution shows that social rights exhibit three interrelated dimensions: promoting the people’s livelihood, promoting democratic politics, and promoting citizens’participation in state-building. In the overall structure and normative intent of the Chinese Constitution, social rights are not just a kind of social and economic right, but also a basic right with a socialist nature. Social rights are not only the rights of an individual to ask for economic welfare from the state, but also the basic right to citizenship allowing the realization of a complete social identity. Social rights are not only of a socio-economic nature, but also of a political nature. The normative structure of social rights needs to be reconstructed based on this understanding. Social rights’obligation to protect not only points to specific state institutions such as the constitutional review organ and the judiciary, but also to the whole system of state governance, thus forming a Chinese-style social rights guarantee model.