Jiajun Dai

Jiajun Dai

June 30, 2026

Rawls’s Theory of Justice, Procedural justice, Procedural law, China-West comparison, Localization of the Rule of Law.

John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice remains one of the most influential works in contemporary political philosophy. Its conception of procedural justice has provided an important normative foundation for the development of modern procedural legal systems, while questions concerning its applicability across different legal and cultural contexts continue to attract scholarly attention. Drawing on institutional practices in criminal procedure, administrative procedure, and civil procedure, this article examines the pathways through which Rawlsian justice has shaped procedural law in both Western jurisdictions and China. It compares the shared features and divergent patterns of implementation in these legal systems and explores the underlying factors that account for such differences, including legal culture, institutional traditions, and broader conceptions of justice. The study argues that Rawlsian theory has contributed to the consolidation of widely accepted procedural principles, such as procedural neutrality and equal participation, in both Chinese and Western legal contexts. At the same time, its reception in China has been characterized by a selective adaptation guided by the primacy of substantive justice. By clarifying the logic of this localized adaptation, the article sheds light on how foreign normative theories can be incorporated into China’s procedural rule-of-law development and offers a case study for understanding the cross-cultural transmission of political-philosophical ideas.

© 2026, the Authors. Published by ISCCAC

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license