On the basis of newly available court decisions, official documents and literature, the panel investigates different layers of the legal effects of the Chinese constitution. Although the Chinese Communist Party holds sovereign power to determine the meaning of the constitution in the one-party state, legal scholarship and court practice advance their distinctive approaches to develop the constitution into law that is applied in legal practice. We investigate court practice with relation to the citation of fundamental rights in judicial legal reasoning of Chinese courts both with a focus on political rights and administrative litigation. We investigate the official and scholarly views on the introduction of a constitutional review mechanism within the party-state structure and explore the application of core concepts of party ideology by courts that function as constitutional principles and inform the interpretation of ordinary laws.