This book aims to explore the construction of Chinese law, with an evolution that has been strongly inspired by international law that has functioned as a "pioneer of legal civilization" in China. Chinese law is a fluid sedimentation of traditional elements of Chinese culture and the internalization of external elements. The internal dimension of Chinese legal evolution therefore coincides with a progressive incursion also at the international level, questioning the traditional rules of international relations. The most relevant and comprehensive concept that has been proposed by China in recent years is certainly the idea of building a "community of shared future for mankind." This aspiration demonstrates a global and integral vocation of international law capable of embracing relations of a new type, towards a multi-polar democratization of international relations, which mark the need for the beginning of a new era.

This insightful book investigates the historical, political, and legal foundations of the Chinese perspectives on the rule of law and the international rule of law. Building upon an understanding of the rule of law as an 'essentially contested concept', this book analyses the interactions between the development of the rule of law within China and the Chinese contribution to the international rule of law, more particularly in the areas of global trade and security governance.

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.

The rise of China signals a new chapter in international relations. How China interacts with the international legal order--namely, how China utilizes international law to facilitate and justify its rise and how international law is relied upon to engage a rising China--has invited growing debate among academics and those in policy circles. Two recent events, the South China Sea Arbitration and the US-China trade war, have deepened tensions. This book, for the first time, provides a systematic and critical elaboration of the interplay between a rising China and international law. Several crucial questions are broached. These include: How has China adjusted its international legal policies as China's state identity changes over time, especially as it becomes a formidable power? Which methodologies has China adopted to comply with international law and, in particular, to achieve its new legal strategy of norm entrepreneurship? How does China organize its domestic institutions to engage international law in order to further its ascendance? How does China use international law at a national level (in the Chinese courts) and at an international level (for example, lawfare in international dispute settlement)? And finally, how should "Chinese exceptionalism" be understood? This book contributes significantly to the burgeoning and highly relevant scholarship on China and international law.

Built on the theme “history, culture and international law”, this special course gives a comprehensive review of China’s contemporary perspective and practice of international law in the past 60 years, with its focus on the recent 30 years when China is gradually integrated into international legal system through its opening up and economic reform process. After an in-depth revisit of China’s position on sovereignty and non-interference from a historical and cultural perspective, the author further explores a few areas of importance where China’s viewpoints often invite general interest: human rights, sustainable development, and multilateralism and regional cooperation.

Law, in particular its actual functioning in any given society, is above all a part of the culture of that society - a part of its historical, political, social and intellectual creation. If a black-letter' approach towards law in the West is under increasing criticism, it is particularly unhelpful, if not misleading, in understanding Chinese law, its nature and developments. Rather, to understand Chinese law, its nature and developments, we need to examine the Chinese legal traditions, the prevailing political and economic situations, Party policies on economic reform and tolerance towards political liberalisation, and scholarly discussions and debate. This is the approach of this book. Its aim is to put Chinese law in context', to outline the nature and present status of its development, and to analyse the meaning of the law within the Chinese context. However, this monograph does not ignore the practical needs for determining the precise contents of the black- letter' law either. A study of this kind necessarily involves a process of topic selection. However, to avoid over-generalisation and over-simplification, it also demands a considerable degree of comprehensiveness in coverage. For this reason, the book covers what the Chinese scholars term fundamental law' and basic branches' of law, while other topics are covered because they are either crucial for the understanding of the law (such as legal traditions in China) or of practical importance (such as foreign investment and trade). Chapter One provides an historical background to traditional Chinese legal culture' and modern law reforms. The historical background of specific topics is examined as the topics are analysed inthe following chapters. Chapter Two deals with the changing fate of law under Communist rule. Its focus is on the underlying factors and justifications for such changes. Chapter Three introduces discussions on specific branches of law, from public law (constitutional law, law-making, administrative law, criminal law, criminal procedure law) to private' law (civil law, family law, contracts, law on business entities, and law on foreign investment and trade). Each of these is dealt with in a separate chapter. After the analysis of these substantial topics, certain conclusions are drawn, which attempt to define the nature of Chinese law and its developments in present-day China.

How did American schoolchildren, French philosophers, Russian Sinologists, Dutch merchants, and British lawyers imagine China and Chinese law? What happened when agents of presumably dominant Western empires had to endure the humiliations and anxieties of maintaining a profitable but precarious relationship with China? In Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes, Li Chen provides a richly textured analysis of these related issues and their intersection with law, culture, and politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using a wide array of sources, Chen's study focuses on the power dynamics of Sino-Western relations during the formative century before the First Opium War (1839-1842). He highlights the centrality of law to modern imperial ideology and politics and brings new insight to the origins of comparative Chinese law in the West, the First Opium War, and foreign extraterritoriality in China. The shifting balance of economic and political power formed and transformed knowledge of China and Chinese law in different contact zones. Chen argues that recovering the variegated and contradictory roles of Chinese law in Western "modernization" helps provincialize the subsequent Euro-Americentric discourse of global modernity. Chen draws attention to important yet underanalyzed sites in which imperial sovereignty, national identity, cultural tradition, or international law and order were defined and restructured. His valuable case studies show how constructed differences between societies were hardened into cultural or racial boundaries and then politicized to rationalize international conflicts and hierarchy.