The Understanding of the Constitution by China’s Labor Law Academia: Formation, Evolution and the Future

China’s labor law academia has developed a self-contradicted understanding of the Chinese Constitution since its enactment in 1982. Labor law scholars emphasized labor law’s function to implement the Constitution, justified labor law’s independence as a department of law with the Constitution, and proposed labor law reforms based on the Constitution. Nevertheless, they have not interpreted the Constitution correctly as legal norms. Rather, they deviated from the original meaning of the Constitution repeatedly on the levels of general principles and concreted institutions of labor law. Such an understanding of the Constitution cannot merge labor law into the legal order concentrated around the Constitution. It shall be reformed by introducing the vision of departmental constitutionalism. To do that, labor law questions shall be robustly elevated to constitutional level for answers; historical and systematic methods of constitutional interpretation shall be deployed, and the authoritativeness of verified sources of interpretation shall be weighed properly.