Was it coincidence that on May 16, 1996-the thirtieth anniversary of the launching of China's infamous Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution-the front-page banner headline of the China Daily trumpeted "State broadens lawyers' powers?"' Undoubtedly recalling Chairman Mao Zedong's admonition that "a single spark can start a prairie fire," his current revolutionary successors in the Beijing leadership had forbidden all activities that might recall the introduction of the most lawless period in China's millennial history, fearing that explicit raking up of the worst disaster inflicted by the Chinese Communist Party ("Party" or "CCP") might stoke the fires of popular discontent. Yet, by announcing on May 16 that the National People's Congress ("NPC") had just adopted the first law on lawyers since establishment of the People's Republic of China ("PRC") in 1949, the leadership symbolized its repudiation of an era when newspaper editorials bore titles such as "In Praise of Lawlessness" and when lawyers were condemned as the worst of that "stinking ninth category" of antisocial elements called intellectuals. This recent vignette illustrates the state of civil procedure reform in the world's most populous and most rapidly developing country. In China, the focus is and must be upon institutions rather than procedures. Without strong legal institutions to implement and enforce them, civil procedures are not worth the paper on which their authorizing legislation is printed. Indeed, they become a snare and a delusion.