Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the evolution of China’s legal system has gradually shifted away from an approach primarily driven by institutional transplantation, moving instead toward a development trajectory characterized by practical experimentation, theoretical consolidation, and legislative refinement. In the field of criminal law in particular, local judicial authorities—either under the guidance of higher judicial organs or through their own initiatives in institutional innovation—have often taken the lead in piloting reforms. After a period of exploration and experimentation, the academic community has distilled and synthesized the successful practices that emerged, progressively building consensus on their legitimacy and structural design and articulating more mature theoretical frameworks to underpin reform. Subsequently, through the combined efforts of practitioners and scholars, the legislature has extracted those institutional arrangements considered relatively mature and less controversial, incorporating them into national legislation as foundational legal norms. This process has served, on the one hand, to confer legal legitimacy on the reforms and to defuse criticisms such as the claim that “the reforms lack a statutory basis.” On the other hand, it has formally integrated the institutional breakthroughs achieved in practice, endowing them with binding legal authority. Taken together, this approach has come to represent one of the most important models shaping the development of China’s legal system over the past two decades.