A critical evaluation of the latest reform in Chinese law that engages legal scholarship with research of Chinese legal historians.

This book analyzes the principal legal institutions that have emerged in China and considers implications for U.S. policy of the limits on China's ability to develop meaningful legal institutions.

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.

This book systematically and concisely expounds the construction process of China's legal system since China's reform and opening-up. Chapter 1 defines the legal system in China and describes the development of China's legal system from 1949 to 1978. Chapter 2 introduces China's legislative system, including its historical development, division of legislative functions and power, and legislative procedures. Chapter 3 compares the differences between the law systems of other countries and China's law system and how other law systems in the world influences the law system in China. Chapter 4 studies China's constitutional law system, including its historical development, forms of law and enforcement of the constitution. Chapter 5 introduces China's administrative legal system, including main principles, administrative legislation and administrative compensation. Chapters 6, 7, 8, 9 describe China's civil and commercial legal system, China's economic legal system, China's social legal system and China's criminal legal system respectively. Chapter 10 introduces China's legal system in litigation and non-litigation procedure in terms of criminal, civil, administrative and non-litigation procedures. Chapter 11 analyses the legal system of the special administrative regions in China and its relationship with China's legal system. The last chapter, Chapter 12 studies the relationship between the international law and China's domestic law system.

China's legal system is vast and complex, and robust scholarship on the subject is difficult to obtain. Inside China's Legal System provides readers with a comprehensive look at the system including how it works in practice, theoretical and historical underpinnings, and how it might evolve. The first section of the book explains the Communist Party's utilitarian approach to law: rule by law. The second section discusses Confucian and Legalist views on morality, law and punishment, and the influence such traditional Chinese thinking has on contemporary Chinese law. The third section focuses on the roles of key players (including judges, prosecutors, lawyers, and legal academics) in the Chinese legal system. The fourth section offers Chinese legal case studies in civil, criminal, administrative, and international law. The book concludes with a comparison of China's fundamental governing and legal principles with those of the United States, in such areas as checks and balances, separation of powers, and due process. - Uses extensive legal materials and historical documents generally unavailable to Western based academics - Gives insider knowledge, including first-hand experience teaching law, and close involvement with judges, attorneys, and law professors in China - Analyses legal issues from historical and cultural perspectives holistically

This groundbreaking book examines the changing Chinese legal system since 1978. In addition to historical analyses of changes at the economic, political-legal, and social levels, Liang gives special attention to crime and punishment functions of the legal system, and the current judicial system based on field research, i.e., court observations in both Beijing and Chengdu. The court system has been in a process of systemization, both internally and externally, seeking more power and relative independence. However, traditional influences, such as preference of mediation (over litigation) and substantive justice (over procedural justice), and lack of respect (from the masses) and guaranteed power (from the political structure), still have major impacts on the building and operation of the judicial system. Liang also shrewdly places the Chinese legal and political reform within the global system. This book, which reshapes our understanding of the economic, political, and essentially legal changes in China within the global context, will be crucial reading for scholars of Asia, law, criminal justice, and sociology.

This book explores legal mobilization, culture, and institutions in contemporary China from a perspective informed by 'law and society' scholarship.