During this period, remarkable achievements were made in the building of the legal system. In a situation where hundreds of new things were awaiting to be built on the ruins of the old and many problems needed to be tackled, it was hard to concentrate on legislation. And there was little experience in working out nationally unified laws, regulations and decrees at that time. But legislative activities were still carried out in a large scale and rather rapidly. Therefore, there emerged the first and only climax in the first 30 years of New China’s legislation. It readjusted a wide range of social relations and eventually formed a legal system to include the Constitution, Administrative Law, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure Law, Marriage Law, Economic Law, Labor Law, Law of Social Welfare, as well as laws concerning science and technology, education, culture, military affairs and ethnicity. Some of the specific laws, such as the Constitution, the Marriage Law and Law of Military Affairs, had state laws as the mainstay. The Constitution had become a rather large group of laws to include the Constitution and constitutional laws or documents.

However, there were many shortcomings in the legal system of this period. Many things were not regulated through law as they should have been: as a big agricultural country, China had no agriculture law worked out; the Civil Law, which is closely related to citizens’ rights and interests, did not exist in the legal system; the Criminal Law and Civil Law were both still in the making. Most of the established departmental laws lacked a legal backbone at their core or foundation. Many of the laws worked out during that period were, to a large degree, temporary, trial, or transitional, and many of them became unsuitable very soon after. But they could not be amended, supplemented or abolished in time. As a result, due to the lack of experience and the limitation of historical conditions, the legal system of this period showed its insufficiency in many respects, including its coordination with social development, its internal coordination, learning from past and foreign experiences, and, in particular, in realizing scientific development and modernization.

The legislation in this period suffered not only over-decentralization in the beginning, but also the unclear division of power spheres between central and local authorities and that between the central legislative bodies. Dereliction of duty and over-stepping one’s power were both in obvious existence. The construction of legislation was not strengthened enough; as no clear and specific regulations in the form of law had been made on main links in the procedure of legislation, there was no legal program for many legislative activities to follow; it was even harder to find a law to abide by while working through certain legislative steps, such as the preparatory work for formal legislation, the afterward work for completion of the legislation, and the amendment, abolishing and interpretation of laws. As for the relations between the Communist Party and the legislation, the government and legislation, the court and legislation, and a leading individual with the legislation, there had been no decisions made and confirmed as laws on a basis of proper handling. Few of the numerous other systems had been legalized. There was no existence of a law on legislation, law on legislative procedures, or law of legislative standard, and nobody ever bothered to ask about them.