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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.
This book explores legal mobilization, culture, and institutions in contemporary China from a perspective informed by 'law and society' scholarship.
This timely collection presents articles written by Chinese and Western authors on law reform in the People's Republic of China from its beginning in 1978 until the present day. The first part presents differing perspectives on the history of law reform. Separate sections are devoted to core institutions: the Constitution, the legislature, administrative law, courts, criminal process, the legal profession, extra-judicial dispute resolution and citizen petitions. Alongside an original introduction the book will be of interest to readers with specialized interests in Chinese law but also to anyone interested in China's governance.
The fifteenth and final volume of the series The Making of Modern Freedom, this book explores a variety of issues surrounding questions of human rights and freedom in China. The chapters suggest very significant realms of freedom, with or without the protection of law, in the personal, social, and economic lives of people in China before the twentieth century. This was recognized, and partly codified, in the early twentieth century, when legal experts sought to establish a republic of laws and limits. The process of legal reform, however, would be placed firmly in the service of strengthening the post-imperial Chinese nation-state, culminating after 1949 in despotism unparalleled in Chinese history. Nevertheless, the last decades of the twentieth century and the first years of our own would witness a slow, steady, but unmistakable reassertion of realms of personal and communal autonomy that show, even in an era of strong states, at least the prospect of institutionalized freedoms.
Since the early 1980s, the People's Republic of China has been building legal institutions where no meaningful ones had existed before. This collection of essays by leading international scholars of Chinese law analyses the accomplishments of Chinese law reform and the problems that confront the Chinese leadership and the Chinese people in their struggle to define the role of law in China. Chinese economic reforms have led to a dramatic rate of economic growth, and have also made China the world's leader in attracting foreign capital. A sound legal system is not only essential for continued economic growth and foreign investment, but its future development will express and reflect the evolut...
This is the first full-length study in English of Peng Zhen (1902-97), a revolutionary comrade of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, and an influential legal policymaker in China during both men’s regimes. As one of the chief architects of PRC law and legal institutions during the 1950s and again in the 1980s, Peng left an indelible mark on the present legal system of China. This book analyzes the evolution of Peng’s legal views from his days as a revolutionary in the 1930s and 1940s, through his participation in Communist rule during the 1950s, to his conflicts with Mao and his purge in 1966, and finally to his rehabilitation and resumption of legal reform activities in the 1980s and 1990s. Initially, Peng embraced Leninist notions of law and political authority. These ideas gradually evolved so that in the 1980s Peng advocated increased reliance on formal rules and procedures as mechanisms of governance.
What changes occurred and what remained the same in Chinese civil justice from the Qing to the Republic? Drawing on archival records of actual cases, this study provides a new understanding of late imperial and Republican Chinese law. It also casts a new light on Chinese law by emphasizing rural areas and by comparing the old and the new.
The opening of local archives to Western scholars in the 1980's has provided the basis for this reexamination of civil law in Qing and Republican China. This pathbreaking volume demonstrates that, contrary to previous scholarly understanding, Qing and Republican courts dealt extensively with such civil matters as land rights, debt, marriage, and inheritance, and did so with striking consistency and in conformity with the written code.
Gradual change has been a hallmark of the Chinese reform experience, and China's success in its sequential approach makes it unique among the former command economies. Since 1979, with the inception of the continuing era of reform, the Chinese economy has flourished. Growth has averaged nine percent a year, and China is now a trillion dollar economy. China has become a major trading power and the predominant target among developing countries for foreign direct investment. Despite all this, China remains poor and the reform process unfinished. This book takes its defining theme from Deng Xiaopeng's famous metaphor for gradual reform: “feeling the stones to cross the river.” How far has China progressed in fording the river? The experts who contributed to this volume tackle many aspects of that question, assessing Chinese progress in policy reform, priorities for further reform, and the research still needed to inform policymakers’ decisions.
This study examines the law of intellectual property in China from imperial times to the present. It draws on history, politics, economics, sociology, and the arts, and on interviews with officials, business people, lawyers, and perpetrators and victims of 'piracy'. The author asks why the Chinese, with their early bounty of scientific and artistic creations, are only now devising legal protection for such endeavors and why such protection is more rhetoric than reality on the Chinese mainland. In the process, he sheds light on the complex relation between law and political culture in China. The book goes on to examine recent efforts in the People's Republic of China to develop intellectual property law, and uses this example to highlight the broader problems with China's program of law reform.