Chapter 1
Source of Rule of Law: From “Ruled by Law” to Promoting Law-based Governance of a Country in an All-around Way

“Law is a high-tension cable, whoever breaks it will pay the price; law is a guardian, it protects the good and punishes the evil.”

“Law is a barrier on the cliff; you are doomed once you go across it.”

“Law protects good deeds and punishes evildoing.”

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Metaphors of law are too numerous to list. These metaphors share one thing in common—they all emphasize the importance of law and rule of law.

The word “rule of law” frequently appears in our life. In the activity of “Chinese Character Inventory” held by the National Language Resource Monitoring and Research Center at the end of 2014, the Chinese character “law” stood out of the 7,000 characters and was chosen as “Character of the Year” by net users. At the same time, the word “rule of law” ranked first in the “Top Ten Catchwords” selected by Chinese media. Such phenomena reflect the important status of “rule of law” in society. However, though frequently mentioned, connotation of “rule of law” is pretty ambiguous in the mind of many people. Therefore, it is necessary to clarify the concepts like “rule of law”, “rule of man” and “rule of virtue”, etc. to avoid confusion.