法治指数Rule of Law Index

The rule of law is the basic means by which a modern state governs. Aristotle, in his Politics, put forward the twofold meaning of the rule of law—"the established laws should be universally obeyed, and the laws so obeyed should themselves be well-made laws" (good law and good governance). Locke and Rousseau laid the cornerstone of "equality before the law" through social contract theory; Dicey established the "rule of law" (supremacy of law, equality before the law, and the protection of rights by the courts) as a constitutional tradition. In China, comprehensively governing the country according to law has been established as "the basic strategy by which the Party leads the people in governing the country", adhering to the integrated construction of a law-based state, a law-based government and a law-based society, and achieving a historic leap from "rule of man" to "rule of law" and from "having laws to abide by" to "good law and good governance".

For measuring a country's level of rule of law, the international mainstream is the Rule of Law Index published by the World Justice Project (WJP), which relies mainly on expert questionnaires and public opinion surveys; its methodology has limited transparency and its indicator framework leans toward Western concepts of the rule of law, making it difficult to objectively reflect the diverse achievements of different civilizational forms and rule-of-law models. The CPPPS Rule of Law Index does not directly reproduce the WJP ranking, but computes its own score from underlying public data such as economic scale, the scale of legal talent, completeness of the legal system, judicial fairness, protection of rights and interests, social order, smart justice, and rule-of-law society development, striving for objectivity and neutrality.

The CPPPS Rule of Law Index follows a unified four-dimensional framework: Scale (economic volume, the scale of the legal profession) measures the material and human-resource foundation for the operation of the rule of law; Quality (completeness of the legal system, judicial fairness, protection of rights and interests, social order) measures the core quality of good law and good governance and carries the highest weight; Innovation (smart justice / digitalized rule of law) measures the digitalization and intelligence of the rule of law, reflecting the new momentum of "digital justice"; and Contribution (rule-of-law society development) is a distinctive CPPPS dimension measuring the effectiveness of building a "rule-of-law society" through people's mediation, legal education and publicity, grassroots governance, one-stop diversified dispute resolution, and legal aid—a dimension absent from most international rankings yet most indicative of the essence that "the rule of law is for the people and relies on the people". The four dimensions are normalized to [0,1] by range standardization and then weighted and summed, with large-span scale indicators taken in logarithmic form.

Evaluation results: China, Germany, the United Kingdom, Singapore and Canada rank in the top five. China's rule-of-law achievements are especially notable—with the completeness of its socialist legal system with Chinese characteristics, its good social order, its leadership in smart justice (internet courts, online dispute resolution, blockchain evidence storage), and the global uniqueness of its rule-of-law society development including people's mediation, pre-litigation mediation and one-stop diversified dispute resolution, it ranks in the front ranks in the "Innovation" and "Contribution" dimensions and steadily holds a first-tier overall score. Overall, countries with a complete legal system, judicial fairness, good social order and solid rule-of-law society development rank higher, while countries with deteriorating public security, insufficient judicial credibility and a weak rule-of-law society foundation rank lower. The ranking data are based on publicly known approximate values (marked "subject to official figures"), are permanently free and public, and are provided for research and reference only.

The essence of the level of rule of law is whether a country "has good laws, whether those good laws are generally obeyed, whether rights are effectively protected, and whether the rule of law serves the people". CPPPS decomposes this into four measurable dimensions:

Each indicator is range-standardized to [0,1] (inverse indicators take 1−x); large-span scale indicators first take the natural logarithm and are then standardized; the four dimensions are then weighted and summed:

Here 「′」 denotes the [0,1] value after range standardization. The composite score is presented in descending order across roughly 30 major economies in this tier; tiers (first tier: top three, second tier: fourth to tenth, third tier: eleventh to twentieth, fourth tier: the rest) are provided only for layered reading, and no ordering is implied within the same tier.

Basis for the weight design: the core of the rule of law is "good law and good governance", so Quality carries the highest weight (0.40); Scale provides the material and human-resource foundation, but a large economy does not equate to a high level of rule of law, so it accounts for only 0.25 and is taken in logarithmic form; the Contribution dimension (0.20) and the Innovation dimension (0.15) are CPPPS extensions to the traditional rule-of-law evaluation framework, highlighting the contemporary connotations of "the rule of law for the people and relying on the people" and "digital justice".

Nominal GDP and the number of legal professionals use public data (IMF World Economic Outlook, World Bank WDI, and judicial statistics from various ministries of justice / bar associations / judicial systems); this page uses publicly known approximate values (around 2025), all marked "subject to official figures". The six items—completeness of the legal system, judicial fairness, protection of rights and interests, social order, smart justice, and rule-of-law society development—are CPPPS composite scores (0–100) based on public data such as the completeness of statutory codes, judicial statistics (case-closing rate, appeal rate, homicide rate), coverage of online litigation and ODR, the volume of mediation cases, and legal aid coverage. Limitations: the rule of law is a complex concept across diverse civilizational forms, so any single score can hardly be fully objective; the six 0–100 scores are subjective composites with limited precision; statistical caliber differs across countries, introducing errors in cross-country comparison. This ranking is provided for research and reference only.