Conversation

02.25.18

Xi Won’t Go

Richard McGregor, Taisu Zhang & more
In a surprise Sunday move, Beijing announced that the Communist Party leadership wants to abolish the two-term limit for China’s president and vice president, potentially paving the way for China’s 64-year-old President Xi Jinping to stay in power...

China’s Top Court Exonerates Man 21 Years After Execution

Shan Yuxiao, Xiao Hui & Li Rongde
Case puts spotlight on accusations that judges accept coerced confessions and that police torture is rampant, activists say

With It’s Latest Intervention in Hong Kong, Beijing Wins the Battle but is Losing the War

Gary Cheung
South China Morning Post
Cheung: the NPC should be sparing in the use of its power to interpret the Basic Law, or it risks further alienating the city’s young people

China Lags Behind in Rule of Law Ranking

Josh Chin
WSJ: China Real Time Report
A new global ranking finds China is making limited progress

When China Began Streaming Trials Online

Stephen McDonell
BBC
Boot up your laptop or turn on your smartphone and take a peek inside legal proceedings

Caixin Media

08.22.16

What’s Next for Uber and Didi in China?

New regulations and a blockbuster merger between the industry’s largest players are reshaping the business landscape for China’s car-hailing app companies.And the landscape is widening as car-hailing companies, including Didi Chuxing Technology Co...

Media

08.11.16

The Future of China’s Legal System

Neysun A. Mahboubi, Carl Minzner & more
In early August, Beijing held show trials of four legal activists—a disheartening turn for those optimistic about legal reform in China. What are the prospects for the development of the rule of law in China under Communist Party Secretary Xi...

Caixin Media

06.21.16

Mother’s Fight to Exonerate Executed Son Highlights Gaping Holes in Justice System

More than two decades after a young man in the northern province of Hebei was executed for the alleged rape and murder of a woman, his mother is anxiously awaiting a retrial to clear his name.Zhang Huanzhi’s only son, Nie Shubin, was executed in...

China’s Communist Party Approves Five-Year Plan

Mark Magnier
Wall Street Journal
Economists will be watching to see whether it sets ambitious or moderate growth targets.

Caixin Media

10.27.15

Does the Punishment Fit the Corruption?

After Chen Bokui, the deputy head of a government advisory body in the central province of Hubei, was convicted of taking 2.8 million yuan in bribes by a court in the eastern province of Fujian in April, he received a somewhat stiff sentence—17...

With Beijing’s Voting Plan Dead, Hong Kong Looks Ahead

Michael Forsythe
New York Times
The rejection of a Beijing-backed plan to let the public elect Hong Kong’s top officials begs the question of what happens next.

Media

04.14.15

Henry Paulson: ‘Dealing with China’

Eric Fish from Asia Blog
Speaking at Asia Society New York on April 13 with New Yorker correspondent Evan Osnos, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson explained that it’s impossible to predict the timing or magnitude of a financial crisis, but any country with...

In Sharp Words From Xi, Ominous Implications for China’s Legal Reforms

Stanley Lubman
Wall Street Journal
A Communist saying about the role of law states “the handle of the knife is firmly in the hands of the party and the people.”

Caixin Media

07.15.14

Silencing a Health Reformer’s Voice

Dr. Liao Xinbo is struggling to square his enormous popularity and thirst for healthcare reform with a recent demotion that, in his words, marked the culmination of his frustrated work life.Liao served as Deputy Director of the Guangdong Province...

Power Shift: Hopeful Signs in China’s Legal Reform Plan

Stanley Lubman
Wall Street Journal
The Central Leading Group for Judicial Reform of the Chinese Communist Party announced the reform measures last month and an overview of a new five-year plan issued by the Supreme People’s Court on Wednesday signals a serious intention to implement...

Film Director Zhang Yimou Pays 7.5 Million Yuan Fine Over Children

Agence France-Presse
Zhang admits he has two sons and a daughter with his current wife and a daughter with a previous wife.

Chinese Factories Are Ordered to Release Data on Real-Time Emission Levels

Chrstina Larson
Businessweek
In a sign of progress for the environment and information transparency, China's central government in January ordered 15,000 large and small factories to make real-time data about air and water pollution public.

The Trial of the Chinese Dream

Evan Osnos
New Yorker
Xu Zhiyong tried to change China from the inside, but now he will be tried by the inside. 

Chinese Prosecutors File Charges Against Leading Activist Xu Zhiyong

Simon Denyer
Washington Post
Four days after the U.S. government expressed concern about his imprisonment, Chinese prosecutors have filed charges in court against leading activist Xu Zhiyong, founder of the New Citizens Movement, a loose network of activists seeking to promote...

Conversation

11.19.13

What Will the Beginning of the End of the One-Child Policy Bring?

Leta Hong Fincher, Vincent Ni & more
Leta Hong Fincher:The Communist Party’s announcement that it will loosen the one-child policy is, of course, welcome news. Married couples will be allowed to have two children if only one of the spouses is an only child, meaning that millions more...

Viewpoint

07.11.13

China at the Tipping Point?

Carl Minzner
What will be the future of China’s authoritarian political system?Many predicted that China’s rapid development over the past several decades would inevitably lead to gradual liberalization. Economic growth was expected to generate a cascade of...

Books

07.09.13

Legal Orientalism

Teemu Ruskola
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.     —Harvard University Press

Environment

05.23.13

Food Safety Scandals Bring Reality-Check to “Chinese Dream”

from chinadialogue
In the wake of China’s recent food scandal, Chinese premier Li Keqiang has vowed to enforce the toughest food safety regulations.“We need to crack down on practices that violate laws and regulations with a heavy fist, and make the lawbreakers pay an...

Caixin Media

01.28.13

Cleaning Up China’s Secret Police Sleuthing

Wiretapping, email hacking, cell phone tracking, and secret videotaping are just a few of the cloak-and-dagger techniques long employed by police in the course of criminal investigations in China.But now, for the first time, new rules say that...

Caixin Media

01.13.13

Police to Stop Camps This Year, Politburo Member Says

The notorious system that lets police send detainees to labor camps without trial will be halted this year, said Meng Jianzhu, secretary of the Central Politics and Law Commission, at a conference on January 7.Meng said the Communist Party’s Central...

Caixin Media

01.13.13

Shutter Labor Camp System for Good, Legal Experts Urge

Legal experts have called on the government to follow through with hints at abolishing the country’s notorious system of labor camps.On January 7, Politburo member Meng Jianzhu said at a top conference that the system would “cease to be used.” His...

Viewpoint

11.14.12

The Future of Legal Reform

Carl Minzner
Carl Minzner, Professor of Law at Fordham University, talks here about the ways China’s legal reforms have ebbed and flowed, speeding up in the early 2000s, but then slowing down again after legal activists began to take the government at its word,...

Can One Woman’s Case Change a 70-Year Old System of Injustice?

Yueran Zhang
The story of Tang Hui, a mother sentenced to hard labor through the “re-education through labor,” or RTL, program when seeking justice for her raped daughter, may have created new impetus for legislative change. Among the voices urging Tang...

China’s Turn Against Law

Carl F. Minzner
Social Science Research Network
Chinese authorities are reconsidering legal reforms they enacted in the 1980s and 1990s. These reforms had emphasized law, litigation, and courts as institutions for resolving civil grievances between citizens and administrative grievances against...

Sinica Podcast

09.17.10

Capital Punishment in China

Kaiser Kuo, Gady Epstein & more from Sinica Podcast
Crimes that merit capital punishment in China include treason, murder, corruption, drug-traffiking, and occasionally even wildlife poaching. Yet despite the broad reach of the law here, the true extent of the death penalty in China remains one of...

Reports

10.01.07

The Dispute Resolution Process in Relation to Logging Permits in China

Li Ping
Landesa
This paper focuses on questions related to the granting of logging permits in China. The author finds the current system for the granting of logging permits in China to be lacking. In order to find a solution to this issue, the author reviews...