No other institutions between the Anti-Rightist Movement (1957) and 1966, the eve of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), have received such limited coverage as the Communist judicial system. Most Western scholarship on this period tends to focus on political events such as the Anti-Rightist Movement, the Great Leap Forward, or the Four Cleanups. Some Western scholars who have studied the legal system in the early People's Republic of China (PRC), have merely summarized the roles of courts in this period and have not done any in-depth research due largely to the paucity of available resources. For most, if not all, Chinese scholars, the history of law in the PRC has been taboo, and only a handful of researchers have studied the judicial system in the period from the Anti-Rightist Movement to the Four Cleanups. Like their Western colleagues, none of them has done serious research on this period based on archival records. In 1984, Li Guangchan wrote that Chinese leaders based their legal principles on China's own situation and the Soviet Criminal Law. He claimed that PRC judiciaries followed this mode of operation until the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. In other words, despite frequent political movements, crackdowns, arbitrary trials and imprisonments, and numerous summary executions between 1949 and 1966, the Chinese judicial system had been largely bound by such legal principles and practices.