In recent years, the Chinese Communist Party has declared that its governancemust dominate over all aspects of law-making and enforcement, declaring that itsleadership must be implemented across the entire process of governing thecountry in accordance with the law. Contemporaneous to this new way of thinkingabout the law-Party nexus is a propaganda push to integrate moral values intothe law. This paper is about moralizing governance in the Xi Jinping era. Itexplores the ideology behind the promotion of this morals–lawintegration, focusing on the Socialist Core Values in the legal realm under thecurrent Xi Jinping administration. We do so from two interrelated perspectives.The first examines the relationship between law and morality. Here, we arguethat the Party’s calls for a law–morality amalgam can beunderstood as a form of “pan-moralism.” The second looks at thesupremacy of Party rule, extending the theory of the “Leviathan”proposed by Thomas Hobbes to take into account the Party’s morality push.This two-pronged argument enables us to assert that the Xi Jinpingadministration is creating a “virtuous Leviathan.”
