This is an original interdisciplinary study of Chinese law, its language, and political institution. Evolving within a complex literary framework over thousands of years, Chinese language has lost its conceptual distinctiveness to its multilevel and overlapping meanings and connotations. Chinese law has become inflated with contrary rulings and exceptions. This mass of rules requires an extra-lingual (legal) authority to redefine boundaries and specify applications. This book follows and continues the author's, The Boundaries of Meaning and the Formation of Law (McGill University Press) by illustrating how language shapes the formation, application, and administration of law in various cultural environments. Law and Politics in Modern China is an important book for those interested in Chinese history, culture, law, and politics. It also provides refreshing insights about the way that law continues to function after its language matures and creates contradictions and loopholes within its system of rules--one of the most important issues facing Western legal administration in the immediate future.

The Politics of Law and Stability in China examines the nexus between social stability and the law in contemporary China. It explores the impact of Chinese Communist Partyês (CCP) rationales for social stability on legal reforms, criminal justice opera

This book is a grand review of the centurial development of rule of law in China. It covers the most important issues in this area and presents “political constitution,” a new interpretative framework that allows the Chinese experience of rule of law to be more fully and correctly expressed. It is especially useful to scholars involved in the study of modern China. The main chapters of this book include: The Constituent Movement in the Late Qing Dynasty; The Xinhai (1911) Revolution; Constitution-making at the Beginning of the Republic of China; The Great Revolution in the 1920s; The Rise of the Party State and its Transition; The Founding of 1949 New China and its Early Constitutional Development; and The Dualist System of Rule of Law in the Reforming Times.

This book is prepared primarily for students who are interested in studying the constitutional development and government structure of twentieth-century China. Since the emergence of the Chinese consti tutional movement at the end of the nineteenth century, political institutions in China have undergone constant changes. The first four chapters treat of constitutional development and government systems from the latter part of the Ch'ing dynasty to the re-unification of China by the Nationalist Party in 1928. The other eight chapters deal with the policies, programs, and institutions of the Nationalist and Commu nist governments up to 1962. While treatises on various subjects have been consulted, the sources of this book are chiefly based on the official documents from the collections as indicated in the bibliography. Materials in the first few chapters are partly drawn from my previous works on government and politics in China. Because of the immense scope of the subject and the intricacy of the problems involved, this work is not intended to be exhaustive, but is rather a brief description and discussion of each topic under consideration. As there are many valuable works on China in general as well as on her history and inter national relations, I have tried not to cover what has already been dealt with by others. In my presentation of facts and views, I have endeavored to be as objective as possible, personal political convictions notwithstanding.

Contemporary Chinese Politics: Sources, Methods, and Field Strategies considers how new and diverse sources and methods are changing the study of Chinese politics. Contributors spanning three generations in China studies place their distinct qualitative and quantitative methodological approaches in the framework of the discipline and point to challenges or opportunities (or both) of adapting new sources and methods to the study of contemporary China. How can we more effectively use new sources and methods of data collection? How can we better integrate the study of Chinese politics into the discipline of political science, to the betterment of both? This comprehensive methodological survey will be of immense interest to graduate students heading into the field for the first time and experienced scholars looking to keep abreast of the state of the art in the study of Chinese politics.

This landmark volume deals with such essential questions as: What points of departure, or resources, can be identified in Chinese history and culture for what we call 'democracy'? What are, and have been, their potential for development in a modern China confronted with powerful Western influences? Are there any connections between imperial China’s strong legal tradition and the PRC’s current endeavour to restore the rule of law, in a context of legal globalization in which China itself is an important participant? How serious, or superficial, should the political opening which started in the 1980s be regarded, and the discourse on human rights currently heard in official circles? And finally, how relevant is Taiwan’s experiment with democratic institutions? In this rich and inspiring volume, foremost French scholars carefully clarify the process of political and legal change, convincingly showing that these questions cannot be answered without a proper understanding of centuries of Chinese juridical, philosophical, religious and political thought. Ouvrage publié avec le soutien du Centre national du livre/ Published with financial support by the Centre national du livre.

Since the Cold War ended, China has become a global symbol of disregard for human rights, while the United States has positioned itself as the world’s chief exporter of the rule of law. How did lawlessness become an axiom about Chineseness rather than a fact needing to be verified empirically, and how did the United States assume the mantle of law’s universal appeal? In a series of wide-ranging inquiries, Teemu Ruskola investigates the history of “legal Orientalism”: a set of globally circulating narratives about what law is and who has it. For example, why is China said not to have a history of corporate law, as a way of explaining its “failure” to develop capitalism on its own? Ruskola shows how a European tradition of philosophical prejudices about Chinese law developed into a distinctively American ideology of empire, influential to this day. The first Sino-U.S. treaty in 1844 authorized the extraterritorial application of American law in a putatively lawless China. A kind of legal imperialism, this practice long predated U.S. territorial colonialism after the Spanish-American War in 1898, and found its fullest expression in an American district court’s jurisdiction over the “District of China.” With urgent contemporary implications, legal Orientalism lives on in the enduring damage wrought on the U.S. Constitution by late nineteenth-century anti-Chinese immigration laws, and in the self-Orientalizing reforms of Chinese law today. In the global politics of trade and human rights, legal Orientalism continues to shape modern subjectivities, institutions, and geopolitics in powerful and unacknowledged ways.