Taisu Zhang is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He has published one book on the comparative history of Chinese and English property institutions (The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England), and is writing another on the late imperial Chinese fiscal state. He has also written a large number of articles, essays, and book chapters, in both academic and media venues, on topics in legal theory and contemporary Chinese law and politics. Zhang is a Global Faculty member at Peking University Law School and holds a secondary appointment at Yale as Professor of History. Previously, he has taught at the Duke University School of Law, the University of Hong Kong, Brown University, and the Tsinghua University School of Law.
Last Updated: January 30, 2020
Notes from ChinaFile
03.30.23
For China’s Urban Residents, the Party-State Is Closer than Ever
In a recent working paper, scholars Yutian An and Taisu Zhang argue that local urban governments in China emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic with far more muscle and clout than they have ever had before. Unlike in the past several decades, the sub-...
Conversation
11.29.22
China in Protest
Over the weekend, large demonstrations broke out in cities across China. The protests followed news, spread rapidly across Chinese and international social media, that a fire in an apartment building in Xinjiang’s capital of Urumchi on Friday had...
Conversation
03.02.22
Remembering Jonathan Spence
A few weeks after Jonathan Spence, the celebrated historian of China, died at Christmas, ChinaFile began collecting reminiscences from his classmates, doctoral students, and colleagues spanning the five decades of his extraordinary career as a...
Conversation
07.21.20
Is There a Future for Values-Based Engagement with China?
A key feature of current debates over U.S.-China relations is the proposition that “engagement failed,” in light of the Chinese government’s increasingly aggressive posture towards liberal values at home and on the world stage. Already on the...
Conversation
03.19.20
As Its Coronavirus Outbreak Abates, China Is Trying out a New Look. Is It Working?
As the coronavirus spreads globally, China’s government is working aggressively to change its international image. In the span of just a few weeks, China has gone from the embattled epicenter of the coronavirus epidemic to presenting the country as...
Viewpoint
01.29.20
How Much Could a New Virus Damage Beijing’s Legitimacy?
A month into the coronavirus epidemic that has swept across China, the details of the Chinese government’s political and administrative response remain highly ambiguous. What has been unmistakable, however, is the volume and intensity of social...
Viewpoint
05.08.19
This Year, I Couldn’t Avoid May Fourth
The one hundredth anniversary of the 1919 May Fourth Movement came and went last week much as one would have expected...For some, myself included, the anniversary evoked a set of more complicated emotions. For years, these complications have pushed...
Conversation
03.28.19
What Does the Punishment of a Prominent Scholar Mean for Intellectual Freedom in China?
This week, Xu Zhangrun, a law professor at Beijing’s Tsinghua University who in recent months has penned a series of essays critical of policies of the Chinese Communist Party and of its leader, Xi Jinping, was banned from teaching, relieved of his...
Conversation
10.12.18
Is America Overreacting to the Threat of Chinese Influence?
American civil and political discourse has seen a growing number of reports about worrying Chinese governmental influence in the United States. Most recently, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence decried the “malign influence” of China in the United...
Viewpoint
03.01.18
Maybe the Law Does Actually Matter to Xi Jinping
The February 25 announcement that the Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.) has proposed a constitutional amendment that would remove term limits on the office of the presidency is arguably the most significant Chinese political and legal development in...
Conversation
02.25.18
Xi Won’t Go
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...
Books
02.23.18
The Laws and Economics of Confucianism
Cambridge University Press: Tying together cultural history, legal history, and institutional economics, The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England offers a novel argument as to why Chinese and English pre-industrial economic development went down different paths. The dominance of Neo-Confucian social hierarchies in Late Imperial and Republican China, under which advanced age and generational seniority were the primary determinants of sociopolitical status, allowed many poor but senior individuals to possess status and political authority highly disproportionate to their wealth. In comparison, landed wealth was a fairly strict prerequisite for high status and authority in the far more “individualist” society of early modern England, essentially excluding low-income individuals from secular positions of prestige and leadership. Zhang argues that this social difference had major consequences for property institutions and agricultural production.{chop}Related Reading:“Confucian Economics: The World at Work,” Kazimierz Z. Poznanski, World Review of Political Economy, Summer 2015“What was the Great Divergence?,” C.W., The Economist, September 2, 2013The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Kenneth Pomeranz, Princeton, 2001Civil Law in Qing and Republican China (Law, Society, and Culture in China), Kathryn Bernhardt and Philip Huang, Stanford, 1994Order without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes, Robert Ellickson, Harvard, 1991