Legalism and Politics in Contemporary China

This panel discusses the political logic of legalization in contemporary China. It explores why and how legality has become a necessary functional response to the rise of centralized statism in Chinese governance since 2012. As legality has become a significant source of perceived political legitimacy for the Party-State, there are indications of a permanent transformation of Chinese sociopolitics into a law-centric (but not rule of law-centric) paradigm. The speakers and audiences will discuss the multifaceted implications of these significant changes in contemporary China.

 

 

Hamish Stewart is a Professor of Law at the University of Toronto, where he has taught since 1993. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto (B.A. 1983; LL.B. 1992) and Harvard University (Ph.D. 1989). His publications include books and articles on the law of evidence, criminal law and procedure, and legal philosophy. He has been a visiting professor at several universities in China (including Tsinghua University and East China University of Political Science and Law), and at Sciences Po École de droit.

 

Taisu Zhang is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School, and holds secondary appointments in the History Department the Jackson School of Global Affairs.  He works on comparative legal and economic history, private law theory, and contemporary Chinese law and politics. He is the author of two books, The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation: Belief Systems, Politics, and Institutions (Cambridge University Press, 2023), and The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England (Cambridge University Press, 2017). These are the first two entries in a planned trilogy of books on the institutional and cultural origins of early modern economic divergence. The final entry, tentatively titled The Cultural-Legal Origins of Economic Divergence, is currently in progress.

 

Xiaowei Zheng is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests include local history of the Qing dynasty and early republican political culture, with a focus on the emergence of popular nationalism and the potential of republicanism. Professor Zheng is also interested in the historiography of comparative revolutions, constitutionalism, and democracy. Her first book, The Politics of Rights and the 1911 Revolution in China, is a nuanced chronicle of the 1911 Revolution as it occurred in local and regional areas. She explores the ideas that motivated the revolutions and what populatized the ideas that had such an animating impact on the Chinese people at large. Professor Zheng is currenty working on here second book, tentatively titled The Unfinished Mission: Constitutionalism in China, which aims to demystify and deciphere modern Chinese political discourse on popular rights, sovereignty, and constitutionalism throughout the twentieth century.

 

Li Chen (Chair) is an Associate Professor of Chinese History at the Department of Historical & Cultural Studies and Graduate Department of History, with a cross appointment to the Faculty of Law, at the University of Toronto. His research and teaching focus on critical analysis of the intersections of law, culture, and politics in the context of Chinese and international history since 1500. His first monograph, “Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes: Sovereignty, Justice, and Transcultural Politics” (Columbia, 2016), won Honorable Mention of the 2017 Peter Gonville Stein Book Award from the American Society for Legal History and the 2018 Joseph Levenson Book Prize (pre-1900) from the Association for Asian Studies. He is currently finishing up another monograph, funded by a SSHRC grant, tentatively entitled "Invisible Power and Technocratic Governance: Legal Specialists and Juridical Capital in Late Imperial China, 1611-1911."