In the past 40 odd years, China has experienced sweeping changes on its legal scene. After the denunciation of law and the destruction of legal institutions during the Cultural Revolution, the country set out to rebuild a legal system when the so-called “decade of catastrophe” came to an end. Since then, legislation has proliferated with law drafting skills becoming increasingly sophisticated, courts adjudicating tens of millions cases annually, and the number of legal practitioners growing from 12,000 in 1986 to more than 651,600 in 2022. The concept of yifa zhiguo (依法治国, literally ruling the country according to the law) was formally propounded in 1997. By 1999, the Constitution was amended to declare that “The People’s Republic of China implements yifa zhiguo and builds a socialist fazhi (法治, rule of law) state”. In 2017, the ruling Communist Party of China established a leadership group on comprehensively advancing yifa zhiguo. A year later, a dedicated yifa zhiguo Committee was established within the Party.
What do yifa zhiguo and fazhi mean in the Chinese context? What do the developments in China’s legal arena signify in terms of China’s progress in achieving the rule of law? Looking past the growing body of legislation and the expanding legal profession, the development of law in China since Reform and Opening began in 1978 has travelled through three stages, from laying down rule of law principles as the foundation, to focusing on ruling by law, and finally current efforts to use law as a means of legitimising the Party’s rule and government actions.
In the early 1980s, Chinese legal scholars and policymakers searched for a governance model that would be different from that of the Mao era. They debated about the rule of law and the rule of man. While much of the discourse did not go beyond the traditional tropes of Confucian “rule of (sage) man” on one side and legalist “rule by law” on the other, some scholars introduced and advocated for principles of the Western rule of law, such as the separation of powers, the supremacy of law, equality before the law and Nulla poena sine lege (no penalty without law). The adoption of fazhi (法制, literally a system of law, legal system), instead of fazhi (法治, rule of law), was a compromise between the two broad camps of “rule by both law and man” and “rule of law”. Considering that at that point in time the country was standing on the rubble of the Cultural Revolution, it was probably pragmatic to prioritise building a system of law, which would provide a tangible framework for the rule of law.
Worth noting is that, despite the use of the term fazhi (法制, legal system)instead of fazhi (法治, rule of law), the 3rd plenary session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1978 and the 1982 Constitution adopted key principles of the rule of law. The 3rd plenary session vowed to “make law stable, consistent and with great authority”, to ensure compliance with law, due independence of courts, and equality of all persons under the law. The 1982 Constitution enshrines all the above principles – the supremacy of the law, equality before the law and judicial independence. The constitutional provisions were skeletal, and the Constitution was (and still is) more of a political manifesto than an enforceable piece of legislation, but the provisions manifested the government’s commitment to the key principles, enshrined in the country’s supreme legal document. A blueprint was drawn, allowing future developments to gradually realize the rule of law.
Post-1989 China curbed the tendency to “Westernise” and reiterated the four cardinal principles for ruling the country, namely socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the leadership of the Party, as well as Marxism, Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. The Party searched for a theoretical development for the role of law, and the idea of yifa zhiguo was introduced. The 1999 amendment to the Constitution declared the goal of building a “socialist fazhi (法治, rule of law) state”. The two Chinese characters for fazhi (法治) together mean “law governs”, an essence of the rule of law. The official Chinese translation of the phrase is “socialist rule of law”.
Fazhi is also a shorthand reference to yifa zhiguo. The term yifa zhiguo is relatively straightforward; it has usually been translated as “governing the country according to law” or “law-based governance”. A series of laws were passed to restrict government’s administrative powers, including allowing litigation against certain government actions, imposing procedural requirements and limits on administrative penalties and licencing, and providing for state compensation. These laws aimed to correct and improve previous practices that often had no legal basis, yet it was the bureaucracy and not the ruling Party that was subject to the law. At the same time, the idea of yide zhiguo (以德治国, ruling the country by virtue/morality) was highlighted as a principle parallel to yifa zhiguo. Therefore, socialist rule of law was in essence rule by law, wherein law was but one instrument to govern the country.
Since the 2010s, China’s legal reform intensified, as the Party devoted more energy to “construct a socialist fazhi system with Chinese characteristics and to construct a socialist fazhi state”. The Party has become more visibly active in state affairs, increasingly invoking the yifa zhiguo narrative. Significantly, the leadership of the Party was written into the Constitution in 2018, and it has since appeared in a number of amended or new statutes. The 2018 amendment to the 1982 Constitution therefore enshrines the Party as the legitimate ruler of the country and creates the legal basis for its dominant position. Another important change was the legalisation of previously unlawful means of restricting personal freedom. Most notably, the often-criticised shuanggui (双规, two specifics) which had been used by the Party’s disciplinary committee to detain suspected corrupt officials and witnesses extra-legally, was authorised by the Supervision Law of 2018.
China’s 40 odd years of legal development started with aspiration and foundational principles for the rule of law. Post-1989 it developed to become rule by law, and eventually turned towards using law to legally sanction the Party’s rule.
The article “Shifting Meanings of Fazhi and China’s Journal toward Socialist Rule of Law” (draft available here) was published in the International Journal of Constitutional Law, Vol. 19 Issue 5.Ruiping Ye is a Senior Lecturer in law at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Her research interests lie in the areas of comparative law, the Chinese legal system, law and culture, land law and aboriginal land tenure.
Laura Formichella and Enrico Toti interviewed Jerome A. Cohen
Professor Cohen, more than forty years have passed since the book you edited Contemporary Chinese Law: Research Problems and Perspective, it was exactly 1970. The four hundred pages volume contains important contributions on themes concerning Chinese law. Specifically, your paper “Chinese Attitudes Toward International Law – and Our Own” reconstructs the theme and provides significant reflections and synthesis on the topic. From the 1970s to today, how have Chinese attitudes toward International Law changed?
I started to follow China’s approach toward international law just when the Cultural Revolution began. Changes in the theory and practice of international law in China since 1966 have led to an unthinkable development, of which we have only gradually become aware. Yet the PRC [People’s Republic of China] had demonstrated a revolutionary outlook toward the international community from the time of its establishment in 1949. This was in obvious response to the world community’s rejection of China’s new revolutionary government. If the United States had recognized and established diplomatic relations with the PRC from the outset of the communist regime, we might have moderated its hostility. For our own domestic political reasons, however, we did not. The United States also opposed the PRC‘s entry into the United Nations under any formula. Thus, the United Nations rejected the PRC as the lawful representative of the Chinese people, despite its control of the Mainland and despite the fact that the ROC [Republic of China] authorities had fled from Mainland China to Taiwan. The government of the ROC held onto the Chinese seat in both the Security Council and the General Assembly, even though it lost the civil war. Moreover, immediately after the United Nations rejected the PRC, when the United States decided to pursue the retreating North Korean forces into North Korea and possibly eliminate the buffer state on China’s border, the entry of “Chinese People’s Volunteers” into the Korean conflict served to enhance the PRC’s revolutionary rhetoric against the existing world organization. The United Nations, not only the United States, became China’s enemy in Korea. Even after the Korean Armistice in 1953 and the PRC’s adoption of “the five principles of peaceful coexistence” and a more moderate foreign policy, the UN continued its exclusion of Beijing and Chairman Mao did not abandon the hope of establishing an international organization of developing countries that might rival the United Nations. China’s distrust of the Western-controlled United Nations was matched by its distrust of the international law reflected in UN practice. Moreover, most major Western countries still refused to recognize and establish bilateral diplomatic relations with Beijing. In that era, PRC views of international law were shaped by the Soviet Union’s experts, just as China’s domestic legal developments followed the Soviet legal model until the Sino-Soviet split of the late 1950s and the radicalization of the PRC’s domestic legal system.
The most distinctive of the theories of international law imported from the Soviet Union stated that there were really three types of international law. There was the bourgeois view of international law, to regulate relations among bourgeois states, there was the international law to govern relations between the socialist world and the bourgeois world, and then, there was socialist international law, to govern relations among the socialist states.
Certainly, China’s leaders had good reasons to be cynical about American assertions of international law. During the PRC’s first decade, the United States took many illegitimate, covert actions against China in an effort to undermine the new regime. For example, it flew non-communist Chinese and American CIA agents into China to help organize unrest. Also, after training expatriate Tibetans in mountain warfare in Colorado, it dropped them back into their homeland to stoke the fires of resistance. In mid-1957, China entered a more radical phase at home and abroad, one that culminated in the chaos of the Cultural Revolution’s earliest years, 1966 to 1969, and resulted in the alienation of virtually every significant country in the world. In that period, China’s practice of international law reached its nadir, especially with respect to violating the rights of foreigners and foreign diplomats in China. Fortunately, such institutional and ideological non-conformity began to ebb with the end of the most violent portion of the Cultural Revolution in the autumn of 1969, when Beijing began a renewed effort to enter the UN and to complete its normalization of bilateral relations with the major powers. Yet despite Canada’s groundbreaking establishment of diplomatic relations with Beijing in 1970 and the PRC’s UN entry the following year, China’s leaders, still in the midst of fierce internal political struggles in the waning years of Chairman Mao’s rule, revealed a continuing mistrust of UN institutions and commonly understood international law. A personal anecdote illustrates this point. On June 16, 1972, I had the good fortune to have dinner with Premier Zhou Enlai. I sat on his left and John Fairbank, the great historian of China, sat on his right. We were both from Harvard and had been members of a Harvard-MIT faculty group of China specialists who, immediately after Richard Nixon’s 1968 election, had given the President-elect and his new assistant, our erstwhile colleague Henry Kissinger, a memorandum proposing steps towards a new American policy toward China. Since the first half of this session seemed to go well while reviewing Sino-American relations and the Vietnam war, I decided to ask about the Chinese Government’s current attitude toward international law. I introduced the topic by suggesting that the PRC, having just become a prominent participant in the UN with a permanent, veto-wielding seat in the Security Council, should also consider sending an expert to serve as a judge on the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague. That provoked the loud laughter of all the Chinese officials, who plainly thought it a ludicrous proposal. Why, they wondered, should the PRC want to assume a seat on the fifteen-member ICJ, where they were sure most judges would be prejudiced against an Asian, Communist state and would disagree with its views? Moreover, as has subsequently become even clearer, the PRC has traditionally mistrusted settling international disputes through adjudication, arbitration and other forms of third-party decision-making. Despite China’s millennial practice of mediating domestic disputes, even mediation’s more limited third-party participation in international dispute resolution has been shunned by Beijing. I held my ground, arguing that, for permanent members of the Security Council, an ICJ judgeship is one of the perquisites of being a world power and that the PRC should not pass up the opportunity. It took more than another decade before Beijing finally posted to the ICJ the first of what has become a succession of very well-qualified Chinese judges. However, the process of PRC participation in international adjudication is not complete. Like the United States, China has not accepted the compulsory jurisdiction of the ICJ, nor has it accepted participation in the relatively new International Criminal Court, although it has placed capable representatives on certain ad hoc international criminal tribunals. Moreover, Beijing generally insisted that countries that wished to establish diplomatic relations with it had to acknowledge, to varying extents, that Taiwan should be deemed to be part of China. The PRC’s October 1971 replacement of Taiwan in the UN was the dramatic moment, of course, and would not have been possible if Beijing had not assured all and sundry, at least implicitly, that it would henceforth observe universal standards of international law and practice. Beijing wanted to finally get inside the big tent, and to do so it had to indicate that it would play by the rules.
Other countries had decided that the only way to get China to play by the rules was to finally admit it into the big tent. Thus, the PRC began the process of moderating its statements and its practices relating to international law, and trying not only to become a participant in, but also a shaper of, international law in various forums.
The book that Hungdah Chiu and I did, “People’s China and International Law”, reviews the earliest years of this crucial history. To be sure, a big country with the PRC’s radical tradition could not fundamentally change direction in a day, and, as the following story suggests, the difficulties encountered in the process should not be underestimated. Finally, at least until the mid-1970s, the impact of the Cultural Revolution on China’s educational, research and bureaucratic systems had left many PRC diplomats and officials ill-equipped to cope with the legal demands of the new situation. I remember another personal anecdote: in 1973, the PRC’s permanent representative to the UN, the very able Ambassador Huang Hua, told me how embarrassing it was that, for lack of a qualified official to fill Beijing’s seat on the UN General Assembly’s Sixth Committee, which is responsible for legal affairs, he had to ask his wife, who was only trained in economics, to do so! Almost fifty years later, the situation is very different. The PRC has developed impressive expertise in the field of public international law. Its law schools and political science departments offer detailed instruction in the subject by well-trained specialists, many of whom have done advanced study in the world’s leading academic institutions and some of whom have been invited to teach there. These scholars and their colleagues at the country’s many research and policy organizations often publish sophisticated analyses in books, academic journals and media essays, not only in the Chinese language but also in English and other foreign languages, and are active participants in non-governmental international law conferences and dialogues. In addition, they frequently provide advice to various departments of the Chinese government.
Contemporary PRC officials and diplomats are products of this educational system and have developed their legal expertise in sundry areas of international responsibility. This is apparent from their activities while representing their government in many international fora as well as while posted at home to the Law and Treaty Division and other bureaus of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as well as other agencies within the government, including those that deal with foreign economic and business issues. Some also have honed their credentials while employees of the UN or other public and private international organizations. Together, this impressive and increasingly large group of specialists brings to bear an important body of international legal knowledge and a potential for acting as a restraining influence upon the exercise of untrammeled official power. Of course, as in the United States and other countries, these experts in and out of government often disagree among themselves about the proper application of international law to inevitably complex and controversial problems, and in any event their views are often overridden by more powerful official decisionmakers who may not be attuned to international legal considerations or who give greater weight to political, military, economic and other factors. Because of the PRC’s unusually repressive domestic political climate during the Xi Jinping years, to an unquantifiable extent the opportunities for Chinese international law experts to influence government policies and actions are undoubtedly not as great as those enjoyed by counterparts in foreign democracies. Certainly, discretion is the better part of valor when Chinese experts state their views in public. To be sure, there is greater scope for expression when advocating a future course than when criticizing decisions already taken. Yet, Chinese colleagues tell me that today, whether as official or consultant, one has to tread especially carefully when offering opinions, even within the confidential confines of government discussions prior to the making of decisions.
Professor Cohen, a second question on an equally important topic which is key to understanding many other themes. How is the World Trade Organization, as an international forum that seeks to provide a single platform for member states to negotiate bilaterally and multilaterally and aims to foster the spirit of a new international legal and economic order, understood and utilized in China?
Those looking for evidence to encourage the belief that the PRC will increasingly comply with the current rules-based international order usually take heart from its participation in the World Trade Organization (WTO). That participation was preceded by both a long period of intense negotiations concerning the extraordinarily demanding terms imposed upon Beijing’s entry and Beijing’s simultaneous prodigious effort to revamp its laws, regulations, and institutions in order to comply with those evolving terms. Since its entry in 2001, Beijing has become an accepting and active member of the WTO system, at least with respect to dispute resolution. Those who, because of Beijing’s long-standing aversion to the use of arbitration to settle international disputes between governments, predicted that the PRC would never take part in the WTO’s formal dispute resolution processes have been proved wrong. After a few years of learning the procedures and substance of WTO arbitration, the PRC has become a vibrant participant in the system. It wins some cases and loses others but plays the game! To be sure, the enthusiasm of Chinese spokespersons for the process appears to have diminished a bit of late, and they continue to claim that Western, especially American, experts frequently “outlawyer” them. Yet, ironically, it has been the United States Government under President Trump that has recently posed obstacles to WTO arbitration by opposing the appointment of new appellate arbitrators. The PRC has also shown signs of warily moving toward participation in the World Bank’s institution for the arbitration of disputes between foreign investors and host governments – the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). And, of course, Beijing, in addition to its court system, has long supported a vast and complex network of domestic arbitration institutions for dealing with trade, investment and other commercial legal disputes, including those directly and indirectly involving foreign business. The PRC’s recent successful establishment of the multilateral Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), a welcome supplement and possible rival to the World Bank, should also add to Chinese sophistication and support for international dispute resolution. More uncertain and controversial are Beijing’s many ambitious bilateral One Belt, One Road (OBOR) projects, also grouped under the name Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which represent a more obviously self-serving political-economic strategy. The PRC evidently hopes that the BRI will benefit from the services of new Chinese dispute settlement institutions, such as Beijing’s recently-established international commercial courts. As Susan Finder has written, this appears to be part of an effort to «move the locus of China-related dispute resolution from London and other centers in Europe (or elsewhere) to China, where Chinese parties will encounter a more familiar dispute resolution system». It would be surprising, however, if many of the PRC’s BRI partners with significant bargaining power accept dispute resolution in China instead of in more neutral I, if not their own. Certainly, the PRC, as soon as it established a basic environment for attracting foreign direct investors, insisted that they settle relevant disputes in China rather than in their homeland. Many topics deserve scrutiny, including not only the PRC’s respect for multilateral treaties other than the WTO and UNCLOS agreements, such as those international labor treaties that it has selectively chosen to adopt, but also its adherence to bilateral agreements. The latter topic often receives less attention than the former.
In some cases where bilateral agreements have allegedly been more informally or non-transparently made, it is not possible to confirm either the details of the alleged commitment or the basis for the claim that the PRC has failed to honor it. One example (from outside the area of civil and political rights) is the charge by the United States Government that in 2015 Xi Jinping promised not to militarize contested islands in the South China Sea, yet nevertheless proceeded to quietly do so.
Another is the American charge that, also in 2015, the two governments agreed not to engage in cyberhacking of the other side’s commercial enterprises but that Beijing, after briefly suspending such attacks, subsequently resumed them. In some cases where China has formally committed to bilateral agreements, its implementation has been questionable. An even more recent example of Beijing’s highhandedness In a bilateral consular dispute occurred when in late 2018 it famously detained two Canadian nationals in apparent retaliation for Canada’s cooperation with an American request to extradite a major Chinese business executive. The hapless detainees, seemingly held as hostages more than legitimately suspected criminals, were not given the full protections prescribed in the Sino-Canadian consular agreement. Although minimal consular access to each of them was belatedly permitted, they both continued to be kept incommunicado and denied access to required legal assistance, ostensibly on the basis of Ministry of State Security suspicion that they represented threats to national security. They were also reportedly subjected to all-night lighting in their detention cells. It is unfortunate that, following their ultimate release from illegitimate detention, these detainees have not responded to calls for them to reveal further details of their suffering. Since the end of the 19th century, when China began its process of modernization, the Western expression “rule of law”, in Chinese 法制 fǎzhì, has continued to spread among the Chinese and in academic circles. There is now a strong desire for the rule of law to take hold and there remain many expectations.
However, China’s Five-Year Plan for the Construction of the Rule of Law, between 2020-2025, contains a notion that departs from that conceived by the United Nations, the United States, and the European Union, particularly with regard to this Communist regime’s rejection of the separation of powers and the independence of the judiciary and its completely different conception of human rights and democracy. On this issue too, we would like to hear your views. Let us go to the heart of the matter.
The subject is topical and of great interest. I have spoken on numerous occasions on this sensitive issue and have been able to note the difficulty of Chinese scholars to make analyses free from the pressures of the Communist Party. Happily, I was surprised and pleased by the formidable essay of Professor Ruiping Ye, when I was invited by the International Journal of Constitutional Law to comment on her disquisition (our blogpost). She is not based in the PRC but in the law faculty of New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington and is therefore literally remote from the conflicting pressures to which Chinese scholars of constitutional law are generally subject. Based on my knowledge, I can attest the accuracy of her characterizations and analysis. The periodization that the author Imposes upon the post-Cultural Revolution PRC determination to replace Chairman Mao’s cruel chaos with an appropriate legal system seems correct. The 1978-89 era was an age of great, groping, intellectual ferment. There was a broadly shared felt, if inchoate, need to work toward the goal of subjecting “government,” including the Communist Party that controlled the government, to the law that was gradually being enacted and that would embrace concepts such as “equality before the law” and “judicial independence”. Even after the political fall of the reformer Hu Yaobang as formal Party leader, his successor was also a reformer, the able and dynamic Zhao Ziyang, who continued the vaguely articulated quest to find a way to limit the power of the Party and produce “government under law”. Zhao proposed disentangling the Party from day-to-day state operations, confining it to policy formulation, selection of personnel, and other general matters. If successful, this effort would have developed the rule of law in China. As Professor Ye recognizes, «Given that China was at the beginning of rebuilding a legal system, fundamental rule of law principles could not be realized overnight, but the blueprint was drawn and the foundation was laid, upon which details could be added and structures could be built». Sadly, this was not to happen. The military massacre of at least hundreds of peaceful protesters that took place on June 3-4, 1989 near Beijing’s Tiananmen Square ended the possible reform era. Threatened with popular overthrow, the Party’s suddenly revamped leadership, after actually placing the newly-deposed Zhao Ziyang under house arrest for what would be the last sixteen years of his life, promptly abandoned its flirtation with Westernized “government under law”. In its stead, it chose what may be encapsulated as “law under government”, a path much more congenial to the imperial traditions of the “Central Realm”. Indeed, there is a marked similarity between the Party-state’s enthusiastic embrace of “rule BY law” and the legalist philosophy of government adopted by China’s first emperor. Over two thousand years ago, his Qin dynasty unified the country through uniform application of laws authorizing unchallengeable harsh punishments.
Ironically, there was during this second post-1978 period, which can be seen as lasting roughly from mid-1989 until the 2012 ascension of Xi Jinping as Party General Secretary, an enormous amount of apparent legal progress. It featured constitutional amendments, legislation on many topics including administrative law and government information disclosure authorizing the right to sue officials in circumscribed circumstances, other procedural and institutional improvements, development of an increasingly sophisticated judiciary and legal profession, and a huge expansion in the number of law schools and university legal departments. The prime motivation for these ambitious achievements was the Party leadership’s desire to successfully develop a “socialist market economy” and reap the benefits of cooperation with the world community, as symbolized by PRC acceptance into the World Trade Organization.
Yet this turn toward the new and attractive slogan of “ruling the country according to law” was in fact a betrayal of the hopes for a genuine “rule of law”. Some of these achievements did put certain restraints on the conduct of the official government bureaucracy, as imperial law did too, but in neither case did law restrain the ruling power – in our day the Party leadership and, until the twentieth century, the emperor. Another noteworthy point is the ostensible revival of respect for Confucian philosophy. Until recent years, the country’s Communist revolutionaries, like other twentieth-century Chinese radicals and reformers, condemned Confucius and his disciples as the fount of the “feudalism” that had consigned the once great imperial “Central Realm” to the “century of humiliation” that began, according to Party scriptures, with the Opium War of 1839 and lasted until Communist “Liberation” in 1949. Recognizing from historical experience that the Chinese, like others, are best governed not by coercion alone but by the ruler’s parallel resort to ideology and moral suasion, and seeking to respond to the nation’s sagging faith in Communism, the Party has lately sought to broaden its appeal by invoking a selective version of Confucianism to serve, like the legal system, as another instrument of political control. The third and present period in the post-1978 contest between “rule of law” and “rule by law” began, as Professor Ye notes, just over a decade ago and moved into high gear in 2012 when Xi Jinping assumed Party leadership and shortly thereafter also became both President of the state and Chairman of the National Military Commission. Although the current era might be characterized as essentially a further application of the principle of “governing according to law”, i.e. “rule by law,” that dominated the second stage, the recent changes wrought in the name of “doing everything through law” have been so distinctive as to warrant separate attention. Surely this is Xi Jinping’s attempt to complete the process, already well under way, of cloaking Party monopolization of government power with the mantle of legality. It is, of course, a far cry – indeed at the opposite end of the spectrum – from the hope of the long-deposed Zhao Ziyang to largely separate the Party from the government. Three bold constitutional amendments have brought the Party closer to integration with, and almost congruence with, the government than ever before. The most publicity-generating amendment was the abolition of the two-term limit for the office of the nation’s President. The presidency has gradually come to rival the prestige, if not the power, of the Party General Secretary, for which there is no term limit under Party rules. This amendment legally formalized congruence at the very top of the Party, government, and military hierarchies. To ensure legal confirmation of the principle of Party control over the government, the Constitution was further amended to insert that principle into the document’s body, rather than allowing it to rest, as before, in the oft-perceived ambiguity of the Constitution’s preface. And, to leave no doubt that this principle would be implemented more thoroughly than ever, the third constitutional amendment established a fourth branch of government under the National People’s Congress (NPC). It was designed to consolidate in real life the Party’s control over the other three branches and even over the theoretically all-powerful NPC. The new National Supervisory Commission (NSC) is the most significant innovation yet made in the Soviet government model imported from the late USSR by all other “socialist” states, past and present. It has been endowed with the power to coerce not only all of the Party’s 96 million members but all public officials and others who exercise public functions broadly construed. The NSC builds upon, and shares offices, personnel, and practices with, the Party’s legally unauthorized “discipline and inspection” system, which has played a key role in enforcing the Party’s will among Party members through surveillance, incommunicado detention, and torture so effectively that many targets committed suicide after being summoned. The NSC is considered in fact to be more powerful than the other, pre-existing branches of government – the executive branch including the public security force, the procuracy or prosecution office, and certainly the courts. Although nominally required to report to the NPC like the other branches, the NSC, as the Party’s key legallyauthorized official suppressor of not only corruption but also violations of Party discipline and state law in any respects, is widely thought to be more powerful in affecting individuals and practical affairs than even the NPC and its staff.
In these circumstances, it is easy to conclude that the Party has obliterated prospects for the “rule of law” even while endlessly hijacking its name in order to impose “rule by law.”
How long is the current era likely to endure?
The circumstances surrounding the decisions of Deng Xiaoping to end Chairman Mao’s “class struggle” in 1978 and of Chiang Kaishek’s heirs to peacefully democratize his Leninist-type totalitarian regime on Taiwan during the decade beginning 1987 were very different from those that are likely to prevail for the foreseeable future in twenty-first century China. Yet history is notoriously adventitious, China’s progress under Communism has witnessed many swings of the pendulum, and potential “revolutionary successors” to the ill-fated Zhao Ziyang, prepared to pursue a liberalizing path, amply exist among today’s dissatisfied but suppressed Party elite.
This interview is a part of a volume (in Italian) published by Edizione Scientifiche Italiane and available for purchase here.
Laura Formichella teaches Chinese law at Tor Vergata University of Rome, Law School. She obtained her PhD with a thesis titled “Sistema giuridico romanistico. Unificazione del diritto e diritto dell’integrazione” from Tor Vergata University, where she is a researcher, spending long periods of study at China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing and other Chinese universities. She is the author and editor of numerous publications on Chinese Law and translations into Italian of the most important laws of the PRC. She has participated in numerous national and international conferences as invited or plenary speaker.
Enrico Toti teaches Chinese law at Roma Tre Law school. He obtained his PhD from Tor Vergata University, spending long periods of study and research at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing and other Chinese universities. In 2021 he published the monograph Diritto cinese dei contratti e Sistema giuridico romanistica. Tra legge e dottrina. He is the author and editor of numerous publications on Chinese Law and translations into Italian of the most important laws applicable in the PRC and founder of the website Cinalex.it. He is Visiting Professor at the School of Law of the Shanghai International Studies University.
A new paper by W. Gregory Voss and Emmanuel Pernot-Leplay
Cross-border data transfers are a sensitive topic in many jurisdictions, even more so when China is concerned. The EU and the U.S. regulate those flows in very different ways, and China just issued rules showcasing its own specific approach, mixing privacy and national security together, which have become a compliance hurdle for many multinational companies. Our study observes holistically the regulation of personal data flows both into and from China.
Why and how the USA and the EU regulate data flows to China
In both the EU and the USA, China is often seen as an untrusted destination for data exports because of the risks that would exist for both individual rights protection and national security. These concerns are addressed by restricting the cross-border data transfers to China, but it’s done differently in the EU and the USA.
The USA does not have general data transfer restrictions, but it has taken specific actions for national security and user privacy reasons that limit data flows to China. Those are best exemplified by the Grindr and TikTok cases, both on national security protection grounds, for fear of access to the data by the Chinese government and potential blackmailing against nationals of the USA in a position to obtain access to sensitive materials. This is a regulatory risk for Chinese companies, which has sometimes resulted in them storing data in the USA. Because the USA currently lacks an omnibus data privacy law covering data flows, unlike the EU and China, data privacy restrictions cannot serve as the grounds for such procedures, and therefore the USA must resort to national security rules, instead. Nonetheless, this solution remains impractical and used only for high-profile cases. In the future however, proposed data privacy legislation in the USA may impose requirements on transferring personal data to China, resembling restrictions in other major regions.
On the other hand, the EU has strong data privacy rules in the GDPR, including on cross-border data transfers, but by virtue of the division of powers between the EU and its component Member States, national security issues are left to the prerogative of each of the Member State. The GDPR sets several conditions and safeguards to be applied to data transfers for them to be legal. The main ones are the adequacy decision on the one hand, and standard contractual clauses from the European Commission on the other. The latter provide a legal framework that obligates both the data exporter and the data importer (the entity outside the European Economic Area receiving the data) to protect the personal data in accordance with GDPR principles. An adequacy decision, however, means an entity can freely export data to the country that has received this adequacy decision from the European Commission, which greatly facilitates business operations for companies and economic exchanges between the two jurisdictions. But, in the case of China, such decision is currently virtually unforeseeable. This is due to the fact that the European Commission assesses issues such as the rule of law in the destination country in deciding adequacy. Because of the structural specificities of its political and legal system, China is unlikely to meet this first condition. Companies can still export data to China, but the exporting and receiving parties will need to commit to the standard contractual clauses.
China now restricts cross-border data flows to protect both personal data and national interests
Whereas the USA acts on outbound data flows using mainly national security arguments, and the EU focuses on data privacy, China combines both rationales in its own approach.
To provide contextual clarification, it is pertinent to underscore that the progression of data protection legislation in China has followed a peculiar trajectory. At first, there were only a few rules targeting specific sectors, with lightweight protections. This resembled the US-approach and favoured a free use of personal data without many safeguards and rights for the individuals. However, faced with the increase of privacy abuse threatening to cause social unrest, China gradually moved towards a more protective approach and started the legal transplantation of certain rules and concepts from the EU, offering more protection to Chinese consumers against misuse of their data by the private sector. As one may expect protection of the citizen against data collection by the government remains embryonic, due to the specificities of China’s political and legal system.
This progress culminated in the Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) from 2021, sometimes dubbed as China’s GDPR, which also showcases China’s own approach to the regulation of personal data use, especially on cross-border data transfers through mechanisms implemented in 2023. In a syncretic manner, China has indeed combined data privacy and national security concerns into its mechanism to restrict data flows, impacting both domestic and international companies.
Under the PIPL, companies seeking to transfer data outside of China have possibilities: certification, standard contractual clauses (SCCs), and security assessments. These mechanisms aim to ensure that personal data remains protected and that its transfer aligns with the law’s requirements. The certification mechanism offers a route for intra-group data transfers (akin to Europe’s Binding Corporate Rules (BCRs)). However, its adoption may be hindered by complexities and potential costs. The PIPL’s SCCs provide a standardized framework for data transfers, mirroring similar processes under GDPR. However, unlike in the EU, an organization can use those two systems only under a threshold that may easily be crossed by bigger corporations. Above it, and for more sensitive data transfers, a state-led security assessment is required. This assessment evaluates not only data protection levels but also considers China’s national security, economic stability, and political implications. This is especially the case for organizations deemed critical information infrastructure operators, and is a Chinese specificity that does not exist in either the EU or the USA. Because of the large room for discretionary interpretations, favoured by the vague terminology used in the requirements, this assessment puts multinationals looking to take data out of China in a grey zone, with potential high impact on their business operations. However, it is a risk that China does want to mitigate.
China’s data localization rules are robust and align with global trends in privacy protection on one hand, but feature significant specificities on the other, which leads to uncertainty for companies but provides more maneuvering room to authorities looking to protect China’s interests. As the EU’s GDPR influenced several other jurisdictions’ data privacy rules, time will tell if China’s own approach on data flow screening will be mimicked by other countries, and if the intertwining of data privacy with national security will confirm a new trend.
W. Gregory Voss is an Associate Professor at TBS Business School (formerly Toulouse Business School). His research focuses primarily on technology law and fundamental rights (e.g., privacy & data protection).
Dr. Emmanuel Pernot-Leplayis a principal data privacy specialist at Schneider Electric. He holds a PhD degree in Comparative Law from Shanghai Jiaotong University and writes on comparative law and policy, in the fields of data privacy, digital policy and their implications for national security.
A new paper by Benjamin Minhao Chen, Zhiyu Li, David Cai and Elliott Ash
Guiding Cases no. 19 and no. 24 both concern traffic accident liability disputes and are among those most often referred to.
What are Guiding Cases?
As a matter of doctrine, cases are not a source of law in socialist legal systems. In the People’s Republic of China, judges are generally not required to adhere to or cite prior judicial decisions. These principles have, however, been qualified—some say violated—by the Supreme People’s Court’s designation of Guiding Cases to be followed by all courts when adjudicating similar disputes.
The Guiding Case (指导性案例) system was introduced in 2011 “[i]n order to summarize adjudication experiences, unify the application of law, enhance adjudication quality, and safeguard judicial impartiality” (Provisions of the Supreme People’s Court Concerning Work on Case Guidance, 2010, English here). Guiding Cases are based on judgements selected from courts nationwide and address a wide variety of legal topics ranging from breach of contract to homicide to unfair competition to liability for traffic accidents. A Guiding Case consists of seven key sections, namely “Title”, “Keywords”, “Main Points of the Adjudication”, “Related Legal Rules”, “Basic Facts of the Case”, “Results of the Adjudication”, and “Reasons for the Adjudication”. Beginning in 2015, the “Main Points of the Adjudication” of Guiding Cases – abstract rules distilled by the adjudication committee of the SPC from the original judgments – must be referred to (参照) by courts at all levels when adjudicating similar cases (Detailed Rules for the Implementation of the ‘Provisions of the Supreme People’s Court Concerning Work on Case Guidance’, 2015, English here).
Guiding Cases have therefore been characterized by some as “a new source of ‘judge-made law’ in China” (Liu 2021) and ‘the remarkable terminus a quo’ of the trend ‘toward embracing case law’ (Wang 2020). The true impact of Guiding Cases on judicial practice has however been called into question by many legal scholars and commentators. Previous studies almost uniformly find that citations to Guiding Cases are sparse, and many Guiding Cases are not cited at all (Daum 2017; Zhang 2018). The ‘extremely low’ incidence of citations is taken as symptomatic of ‘the dysfunction of the [G]uiding [C]ase system as a type of case law’ (Wang 2019) and as proof of the incongruity of case-based adjudication in China (Ahl 2014; Zuo & Chen 2015; Finder 2017; Jia 2016).
How to measure their influence?
However, citations might not be an accurate measure of the influence of cases, especially in jurisdictions that do not recognize judicial decisions as a source of law. In our study, we re-evaluate the impact of Guiding Cases on adjudicatory outcomes by searching for instances of text reuse between the Main Points of Adjudication of Guiding Cases and the legal rationales given by lower courts.
Our premise is that reuse of text uniquely ascribable to the Main Points of Adjudication is a strong indicium of the influence of Guiding Cases on judicial decision-making. This idea is implemented by running the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (or BLAST) algorithm to search for text reuse in approximately 3 million judgments of Shanghai and Beijing courts from January 1970 to September 2021. Matches returned by the BLAST algorithm are validated by legally qualified human coders. To make human validation of the machine-generated results feasible, our analysis is limited to two Guiding Cases identified by prior research as being among the most cited (Zhang 2020; Guo & Sun 2018): Guiding Cases 24 and 60.
To summarize, we find more instances of unattributed text reuse than citations for the Guiding Cases studied. For Guiding Case 24, the number of local court decisions that engaged in validated, unattributed text reuse is approximately four to six times the number of decisions citing the Guiding Case. Moreover, between 3.4 and 14.6% of local judgments that could have applied Guiding Case 60 cited it and between 9.5 and 11.7% of them recited language from Guiding Case 60 without acknowledging so.
A close reading of local court decisions reveals that it is not uncommon for them to cite statutory or regulatory instruments for propositions reproduced from a Guiding Case (“statutory ventriloquy”). In addition, rather than quote the Main Points of Adjudication as directed by the Supreme People’s Court’s Detailed Rules, many judgments simply repeated the various legal arguments adduced in the Guiding Case (“jurisprudential retracing”).
It appears that despite applying the Guiding Cases, local judges practice statutory ventriloquy or jurisprudential retracing to avoid citing them as a source of legal authority. Both techniques serve to maintain the dogma of legislative supremacy even as statutory law is being supplemented—and sometimes modified—through judicial initiative.
Do they really have little impact？
To conclude, previous studies report that Guiding Cases are rarely cited in judicial decisions, suggesting that their practical effect is negligible. The anemic impact of Guiding Cases has sometimes been taken as demonstrating the fundamental incompatibility between socialist legality and judicial precedent.
We demonstrate, however, that Guiding Cases are more influential than conventionally thought. The influence of Guiding Cases is not only manifested through citations; it can also be detected through the reuse of text uniquely traceable to them. By uncovering how the Guiding Cases are referred to other than by name, we not only illuminate the operation of Chinese law but also inform debates about legal traditions, cultures, and transplants.
The paperThe Silent Influence of Chinese Guiding Cases: A Text Reuse Approachwas published in Artificial Intelligence and Law in May 2023. The authors will present the paper at the Annual ECLS Conference in Helsinki on September 22nd.The work described in this post was substantially supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. HKU 27603721).
Benjamin M. Chen is associate professor of law at the University of Hong Kong. He applies interdisciplinary methods to the study of administrative and judicial processes and institutions.
Zhiyu Li is an assistant professor in law and policy and a fellow at the Research Methods Centre at Durham University, UK. She studies the interplay between courts, technology, and politics through comparative and interdisciplinary approaches.
David Cai is a MRes/PhD student in the Economics and Management program at the LSE. He uses econometric and machine learning techniques on applied social scientific questions.
Elliott Ash is Assistant Professor of Law, Economics, and Data Science at ETH Zurich’s Center for Law & Economics, Switzerland. His research and teaching focus on empirical analysis of the law and legal system using techniques from econometrics, natural language processing, and machine learning.
In the United States at least, there has been an increasing worry about the state of US relations (economic and political) with Latin American states. Increasingly that is measured by the extent of Chinese development of its own political and economic relations with Latin American and Caribbean states. Europeans, more than most, worry about this shift in the sources of overseas investments from the perspective of their now decades long objectives to embed human rights more directly in economic activities and political life.
US military leaders have also expressed fears about Beijing’s influence on Mexico’s communications industry, where 80 percent of telecoms are provided by Chinese companies, according to General Glen VanHerck, commander of both the US Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command. China is also extending its reach into the ‘Lithium Triangle’ which spans Argentina, Bolivia and Chile: The Chinese battery company Catl recently struck a deal worth more than $1 billion to develop Bolivia’s lithium reserves. Some analysts have speculated this resource-grab constitutes a ‘lithium monopoly in the making’. The benefits gained from these investments are coupled with the willingness of Latin American countries to accept loans worth tens of billions of dollars from China.
At the center of Chinese overseas investment are their state-owned and controlled enterprises. The Chinese state-owned enterprise (CSOE) presents an anomaly in the operation of the well-ordered construction of a self-referencing and closed system of liberal democratic internationalism, especially as that system touches on business responsibilities under national and international human rights and environmental law and markets driven norms. The anomaly is sourced in the increasingly distinct and autonomous framework principles within which it is possible to develop conduct-based systems respectful of both human and environmental rights which are emerging in between liberal democratic and Marxist-Leninist systems.
This essay considers the forms and manifestations of these disjunctions where CSOEs are used as vehicles for the projection of Chinese economic activity beyond its borders. The essay first situates the CSOE within the political ideology of its home state. These CSOEs are both creatures of the political-economic system from which they are constituted and economic actors seeking to maximize return for investment in a risk reducing environment. CSOEs are instruments of state power and its political-economic objectives, as well as value maximizing market participants. They seek to avoid risk and maximize value-but their calculation of risk and value are a function of the normative system from which they are constituted. That, in turn, affects their engagement with human rights and the sustainability impacts of their operations.
To better understand the CSOE especially as they operate in host states is especially necessary as global and national systems for compliance and accountability are refined, and as national security regimes increasingly constrain the extent and form of inbound public investment. To that end the essay focuses on the formal structures for CSOE supervision by state organs that operationalize the guiding ideology through which they are conceived and operated. This provides the basis for a deeper consideration of the way that the projection of CSOEs abroad is structured within a conceptual cage of policy objectives: specifically, emerging conceptions of socialist human rights, including environmental rights and obligations, and an operational framework in the form of the Chinese Belt & Road Initiative. It is only in the complex interplay of these layers of law, principle, regulation, and guidance described above, that one can begin to see the outline of the normative cage within which human rights can be understood and practiced by CSOEs.
Nonetheless, at its core, the study is about risk- its ideology and the way it is expressed through governance expectations and principles. One speaks here about legal risk (to align the discussion with the 1st Pillar of the UN Guiding Principles), but also of business risk (aligning the markets driven, private law structures of the UNGP 2nd Pillar). More importantly, the sort of risk that one encounters here, in comparing the liberal democratic and Marxist-Leninist models of human rights and sustainability, is intimately tied to the principle of “prevent-mitigate-remedy”, and its administrative-compliance overlay. In a sense, when one speaks to human rights and sustainability, and especially climate change, one is using the qualitative language of rights to speak to the quantitative probabilities of risk of harm, and more importantly risk of irremediable harm. The function of those principles, then, framed through the prevent-mitigate-remedy principle is to provide a formula for valuing those risks, and for placing them within a hierarchy of risk tolerance. Increasingly in liberal democratic regimes, risk tolerance for strategies that do not privilege prevention (and then mitigation and last remedy) are reduced, or in some cases, risk aversion is implicitly or explicitly the result of the application of the “principles” analysis. That is fair enough and represents the culmination of conversation about value choices. Nonetheless, Marxist-Leninist systems approach risk, and risk tolerance, in a different way. That difference is in part a function of differences in the conceptualization of both human rights and sustainability as a function of development and collective prosperity. But it is also in part a reflection, effectively, of what might be preferences for mitigation-remediation (or otherwise exit if the costs of prevention exceed the anticipated vale of an activity), at least indifference as between the strategies as a function of expected value. That poses some challenges for any project that seeks global consensus on what had once been the unchallenged valuations and framework of liberal democracy.
Larry Catá Backer is a W. Richard and Mary Eshelman Faculty Scholar and Professor of Law and International Affairs. He does research in Legal Fundaments, Political Economy and International Relations. Currently working on “Next Generation Law”–data driven governance; the emergence of new global trade regimes (Belt and Road Initiative and America First); and the emergence of new theories of Leninist state organization as they may apply to non-Leninist institutions.
Born from an intention to establish a financial credit (investigation) system, the Social Credit System (SCS) is a mega-project to improve governance capabilities and legal compliance. However, the modern publicly run SCS resembles rather an interconnected set of initiatives under the umbrella term of creating “trust” than being a comprehensive system to monitor and rank all citizens. Currently, the basic components at the national level that are being created are the information infrastructure and the joint enforcement mechanism. Both components rest on the sharing among agencies and the general disclosure of compliance information on subjects, to on the one hand punish and educate, but also to facilitate assessing any entity’s “trustworthiness”. They constitute an emerging state-led data processing mechanisms which may strongly impact the lives of individuals, companies, social organizations and other actors throughout China, with the centrepiece being the information it holds about its subjects. Acknowledging the wide-reaching consequences that the contents of social credit information about a subject may have, this article (draft) asks: What legal framework do SCS builders create to guarantee the accuracy of personal social credit information?
Why is Personal Data Accuracy Important?
One area where social credit information is currently bringing about consequences for subjects is the joint enforcement mechanism – or “joint disciplining for trust-breaking”. The joint enforcement mechanism is mostly set up by State Council policy documents, promoting desired behaviours and discouraging unwanted ones through so-called blacklists and redlists. Listing might lead to punishment or benefits by unrelated actors (as redlists confer benefits, they are much less problematic and thus not discussed in detail). It has to be noted that the mechanism’s main focus rests on companies but there is a corporate overlap, as leading personnel can get blacklisted due to their company’s wrongdoings. So far, there is no real central management to these lists. For the purpose of analysing the legal aspects of joint enforcement, four stages must be differentiated: preparatory acts before blacklisting, the blacklisting decision, the publication of the blacklist and the ensuing disciplinary action. They can be based on the same facts and norms but may be executed by different actors and be linked together.
To achieve its goal of promoting trust and steering behaviour, the SCS needs large amounts of accurate data. Simultaneously, data inaccuracy in this behemoth of a reputational shaming machine could potentially harm a large number of people: Because open government data is intended to be reused, it is very hard to control once publicised. For example, if an entity is entered on one of the many blacklists for trust-breaking, she may find her name on display in public spaces as well as online platforms, screenshots of which may be further shared across social media. The inaccuracy discussed here encompasses only factual errors, thus instances where data is not correct, complete, or timely, resulting from inattentiveness during handling. Legal errors on the other hand concern the application of law (for example excessiveness of punishment) and are outside the scope of this study.
What Legislation is There?
The looseness of the concept of social credit and the plurality of actors involved make the regulatory situation quite complex. There is no national social credit law (although a draftforsolicitingcommentsfromthepublic has been published in November 2022), but a host of special sectoral and provincial regulations dealing with different social credit initiatives create a jumbled regulatory landscape. Apart from this, in the context of personal data accuracy national legislation such as the 2021 Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) and the Regulation on Open Government Information (ROGI, revised in 2019) apply. Administrative legislation on procedural issues should be applicable, but the placement of joint enforcement measures under administrative law is still disputed.
What Does it Offer?
Basic Definitions
Generally, social credit is defined as the status of information subjects complying with legally prescribed obligations or performing contractual obligations in their social and economic activities (see e.g., Shanghai Municipal Social Credit Regulations art 2(1), Tianjin Municipal Social Credit Regulations art 2(2)), while social credit information is defined as (objective) data and materials that can be used to identify, analyse and judge the status of information subjects’ compliance with the law and contract performance (see e.g. Shanghai Municipal Social Credit Regulations art 2(2), Henan Provincial Social Credit Regulations art 3 (3)). What this means in detail remains unclear, though. Two types of social credit information exist: public credit information and non-public (or market) credit information, depending on the generating entity (state or private actor).
Accuracy Obligations for Data Processors
PIPL and ROGI provide some guidance on how to handle and publish government information, but data quality requirements are not sufficient for the complex processes of the SCS. The examined provincial documents either set up principles for the processing of public social credit data or impose data-quality responsibilities on information providers. The latter can also be found in sectoral regulation, but only in a third of the covered documents.
Notification Requirements
Because of the multi-actor structure of joint enforcement, credit subjects face the problem of recognizing the possibility of rights relief and identifying the right addressee for enforcing their rights. One important way to counteract this situation is notification requirements. The PIPL introduced a general notification obligation in 2021, covering among other things the processor’s name and contact information, and the methods and procedures for individuals to exercise their rights. But proper notification requirements are generally rare among special legislation documents. To best protect credit subjects, notification should occur at all four possible stages of joint enforcement. In the preparatory stage and after the listing decision they are however only seldom found. A few provincial documents provide for the notification of listing, but only for the so-called seriously untrustworthy lists, which cause stricter restrictions than normal blacklists. Some measures consider the publication of blacklists as a form of public notification. Notification of punishment is generally not covered by blacklist management documents, as the listing entity is usually not in charge of punishment. A quarter of the sectoral and most of the provincial documents do not set up any notification procedures.
Review Procedures Prior to Blacklisting
Among the analysed documents, procedures for prior review can be found only in those measures which also stipulate notification before inclusion. None of the norms provide for suspension, however. A clear classification of joint enforcement measures under administrative law would improve the situation, although there is no general administrative procedure law in China.
Access to One’s Personal Credit Information
General access rights are provided by both the PIPL and the ROGI. About half the provincial documents explicitly set up a right to inquire one’s own information. Other regulations appear to take accessibility for granted and only regulate the corresponding procedures for data providers.
Objection Procedures after Blacklisting
If personal information held by the government is found to be incorrect or incomplete, individuals have a general right to request correction under PIPL and ROGI. The content of specific objection procedures among the special legislation is uneven. Two models can be found in the analysed documents: objection to wrong information for a fixed time period after publication of the decision, or a general possibility of objection. In provincial documents, only the latter can be found, while some of the ministerial documents designate no objection possibilities at all. Generally, the stipulated handling time for objections in provincial documents is shorter than in the ministerial regulations, often calling for verification within a few days, rather than weeks. While the State Council calls for the suspension of enforcement during verification procedures, this is rare in implementing documents. On the contrary, some ministries and the SPC explicitly regulate that objection will not cause suspension or impact publication. A compromise, to mark objected information during verification procedures, is employed by almost two-thirds of the provincial documents. The deletion of non-verifiable data is not always required.
Dissemination of Corrected Data throughout the System(s)
The dissemination of corrected data is thinly regulated. Where it is mandated, it often merely requires that other providers of the information are informed. The information subject itself might only be informed of updates and corrections in its social credit information if the change is due to a successful objection the subject has initiated.
A Patchwork
The study finds that special legislation is inconsistent and that national legislation is often too vague to deal with the complicated and diverse processes of the SCS. Further legislation will be needed to standardise procedures. While it is often difficult for data subjects to exercise their rights against first-party collectors, when raised against third party-reusers of data, the problem multiplies. Special legislation by different national actors and local legislators is very diverse, and procedural requirements are often vague, fragmented or missing. Some regulations deviate from protection measures proposed in policy documents. The rules in the examined documents range from almost no regulation to some very promising models in the eastern, economically more developed provinces. The biggest issue remains a lack of solid ex ante control mechanisms, as most relief is only provided after the fact. This is problematic, as the spread of inaccurate data can cause unforeseen consequences, and reputational damage is difficult to repair.
The article The Regulation of Personal Data Accuracy in China’s Public Social Credit System was published in the Hong Kong Law Journal (2023, Vol. 53, No. 1). A free draft is available here.
Hannah Klöber is a Research Assistant at University of Cologne, where she is currently working on her PhD with the Chair for Chinese Legal Culture. Her dissertation deals with the Proportionality Principle in Chinese administrative law, examining it from a comparative perspective, exploring its application by and use for Chinese actors, thereby gaining deeper insight into its function, potential and limitations. She holds a BA and MA in Chinese Regional Studies, Law from Cologne University. She can be contacted at hkloeber[at]smail.uni-koeln.de
Chinese company law is going through significant reforms. The current law, first passed by the National People’s Congress in 2005 and last amended in 2018, has played an important role in establishing a modern enterprise system and promoting the development of a socialist market economy in China. As stated in the explanatory notes for the first draft amendment to the Company Law, the current law provides the fundamental and theoretical legal framework for companies; however, it lacks detailed rules, in particular, in the areas of directors’ liabilities and the protection of shareholders and creditors. This article maps the proposed amendments and draws parallels to Company Law in the United Kingdom.
To mend these shortcomings, two amendments have been proposed: The first draft amendment was published on 24 December 2021 by the Standing Committee of the 13th National People’s Congress for soliciting comments from the public. Based on the feedback and rounds of consultation, the amendment was revised and the resulting second draft amendment was issued on 27 December 2022. The probably final round of deliberation is expected in August 2023. This is the third major reform of the 2005 Chinese Company Law following the amendments in 2013 and 2018. As laid out in the explanatory notes that accompany the draft amendment, the main purposes of this Company Law reform are to “deepen state-owned enterprise reform, improve business operation environment, improve the protection of property rights and optimize fundamental systems for the capital market”.
The stated aim manifests in the following concrete changes:
The Chinese party-state is given stronger controls over its state-owned enterprises, as decisions made in previous years by the Central Committee of the CPC are woven into the Company Law.
Some clarity on the duty of diligence (勤勉义务) and the duty of loyalty (忠实义务): While the 2005 Company Law stipulates that directors, supervisors and senior managers all owe a duty of diligence and a duty of loyalty to their companies, and lists some activities they must not engage in, specific rules for the application of these requirements are lacking. The proposed amendment (draft article 180) defines the duty of diligence similarly to the duty to exercise reasonable care, skill and diligence as stipulated in the United Kingdom’s 2006 Company Act.
Detailed rules on self-dealing: The draft amendment suggests detailed notification and approval procedures for when supervisors, directors and senior managers enter into a contract or transaction with the company (draft article 183).
Expansion of the corporate opportunity doctrine: Under the current Company Law, the duty to refrain from taking advantage of one’s position to acquire a business opportunity that belongs to the company applies to directors and senior managers only. The draft amendments not only extend this duty to supervisors, but also lay out exceptions such as when the business opportunity was rejected by the board of directors or the shareholder meeting (draft article 184).
Clarification of the joint liability of directors, senior managers and controlling shareholders with the company (draft articles 190 and 191): Directors and senior managers will be jointly liable with the company if they have, either deliberately or due to gross negligence, caused losses to other people when they are performing their duties.
Giving teeth to corporate social responsibility duties: The Company Law requires businesses to not only abide by laws and regulations, but also “observe social morals and business ethics, act in integrity and good faith, accept the supervision of the government and the public, and bear social responsibility” (Article 5). Critiques have pointed out that this provision is a paper tiger as it is broad and comes without remedies. While the draft amendment does specify who the stakeholders are (employees, consumers, and the environment), concrete measures for the enforcement of this rule are not proposed (draft article 20).
Finally, the proposed amendment introduces the double derivative action (draft article 188). Derivative actions are suits brough by shareholders in the name of the company against a third party, normally a director of the company. The institution of the double derivative action, as laid down in the draft Article 188, allows a shareholder in a parent company to sue the directors, supervisors and senior managers of its wholly-owned subsidiary.
This paper explores the rationale for the current law reform and analyses the proposed changes in relation to directors’ duties and the protection of shareholders’ interests. It also assesses the relevant law in the 2006 Companies Act of the United Kingdom in order to draw comparative lessons for future company law reforms in China. The proposed amendments have not solved all of the problems in relation to the current law on directors’ duties and shareholders’ derivative actions; nevertheless, they undoubtedly reflect Chinese legislators’ effort to improve the corporate legal framework and enhance corporate governance in China. If these proposals are adopted in the final legislation, they will bring significant improvement to company law and corporate governance in China; ultimately, they will make Chinese companies more competitive and attractive to both home and foreign investors.
Dr Fang Ma is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. Her research interests include Company law and Corporate Governance in China and in the UK. She can be contacted at fang.ma[at]port.ac.uk.
How does the Chinese system deal with supervening impediments to contract performance? In this article (draft), I address this question from the angle of the (unbalanced) interrelationship between two doctrines: the doctrine of force majeure (不可抗力) and that of change of circumstances (情势变更). The imbalance can be readily seen from the current judicial data showing that the doctrine of force majeure has been applied by Chinese courts ten times more often than the doctrine of change of circumstances. This article offers explanation to the reasons and implications of this striking situation.
It first briefly traces the history of the two doctrines and makes three inquiries about their interrelationship. First, do they address different events? It is noted that there is a general tendency in China to categorically characterise certain events, including the COVID-19 pandemic, as force majeure. This tendency, which neglects or downplays a proper assessment of the event’s actual or potential impact on the performance of the particular contract, is rejected in this article. I discuss various elements of the two doctrines such as the tripartite ‘unforeseeable, unavoidable and insurmountable’ requirements and the ‘non-commercial risk’ requirement, as interpreted and applied in Chinese cases or judicial documents. I conclude that all these elements are intrinsically interwoven with the particular parties and contracts and must be ascertained as such. For example, ‘commercial risks’ should be understood as no more than ‘inherent’ or ‘normal’ risks and therefore depend on the particular parties and contract for ascertaining the scope of ‘inherency’ or ‘normality’. Although this requirement seems to be reserved for the doctrine of change of circumstances, the same requirement is captured by the requirements for ‘unforeseeable, unavoidable and insurmountable’ under the doctrine of force majeure. Similarly, the latter requirements should equally be applied under the doctrine of change of circumstances. In this sense, there is a relationship of homogeneity between the two doctrines.
The second inquiry moves on to explore the different ‘contract impact’ tests applied under the two doctrines. The doctrine of force majeure encompasses two such tests: whether the event results in a situation that the affected party ‘cannot perform’ its side of the contract (the ‘cannot perform’ test) or whether the event renders the purpose of the contract ‘unfulfillable’ (the ‘contract purpose’ test). The doctrine of change of circumstances, since the enactment of the Civil Code, endorses a single test: whether the event renders continuing performance of the contract ‘manifestly unfair’ to a party (the ‘manifest unfairness’ test). This is a critical point of division between the two doctrines – they are distinguished in their respective ‘contract impact’ test(s). One problem in Chinese judicial practice is that excessive use has been made of the ‘cannot perform’ test, which is further discussed in the article. More detailed discussion of the other two tests is left to future research.
The third and final inquiry concerns the differing legal consequences attached to the two doctrines. The most notable remedial difference between the two doctrines is that contract adaptation (or modification) is available only under the doctrine of change of circumstances. This article reviews the general principles/rules for contract adaptation and its relationship with contract renegotiation. In particular, contract adaptation is distinguished from ‘exemption of liability’, which is a unique remedial consequence attached to force majeure, in that contract adaptation varies primary obligations under the contract whilst ‘exemption of liability’ affects secondary obligations only. However, there remains ambiguity as to the meaning of ‘exemption of liability’ which in practice has led to increased discretion.
The second half of the article attends to cases involving a contract affected by COVID-19, bringing the discussion above to a specific context. Cased decided and judicial documents issued by Chinese courts (especially the Supreme People’s Court) concerning SARS and COVID-19 (for a more detailed outline of Covid-19 judicial documents, see Qiao (2020)) are analyzed. I argue that a wider reception of the doctrine of change of circumstances can be observed from COVID-19 documents and should be encouraged. A categorical characterisation of COVID-19 as force majeure should be avoided. Which of the two doctrines is best to be applied in a particular case should be left to be determined through the ‘contract impact’ tests.
It is also observed that from the SARS pandemic to the COVID-19 pandemic, both the meaning and role of the ‘cannot perform’ test have undergone some transformation. The SARS cases are dominated by a narrow understanding of the ‘cannot perform’ test by unduly excluding cases where a party ‘can’, but decides not to, perform the contract. COVID-19 cases, on the other hand, display the revival of a broad interpretation, which equates ‘cannot perform’ with a ‘failure to perform’. Unfortunately, in practice, mostly due to the undisciplined extension of ‘exemption of liability’, the ‘cannot perform’ test has been much overused and abused. This article thus calls for a more structural and coherent approach to the allocation of work between the two doctrines.
Qiao Liu is Professor and Deputy Director of the Centre for Chinese and Comparative Law, School of Law, City University of Hong Kong; Honorary Professor, TC Beirne School of Law, University of Queensland; Adjunct Chair Professor, School of Law, Xiamen University. The work described in this paper was fully supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. 11608821).
China runs the largest online program for publicizing judicial decisions in the world. The mass publicity of court decisions in China, this article (draft here) argues, is part of the broader trend of the Chinese judiciary becoming increasingly centralized. The mass publication of court decisions in China seems puzzling: Disclosure of government information is often linked to an aspiration for political participation, which contributes to accountability and creates an obligation for responsive government. As a style of governance, transparency is usually associated with democracies, and few authoritarian states show much interest in government transparency.
In this article, the authors explain the reform towards greater transparency of the Chinese judiciary in a principal-agent theoretical framework and contextualize it within strategic moves of the central and the local governments in this setting. Previous studies of the political system in China have documented a deeply rooted agency problem between the central government (the principal) and local courts (provincial courts and courts at the lower levels – the agents), often discussed as “local protectionism”: The primary goal of the Supreme People’s Court is that centrally stipulated laws are applied in a unified way for the entire country, however, such application may conflict with local interests and social stability in local communities. Hence, in practice, courts often function as a local apparatus that protects local interests. This tension between the central government and the SPC on the one hand and local governments and respective courts on the other is a result of the structure of the Chinese political system. For example, local courts’ finance and personnel are controlled by local governments. While it is on the reform agenda to make the high court at the provincial level control and manage the finances of all courts in the province, control over personnel remains with the local governments. More importantly, information asymmetry embedded in the multiple-layered government structure and thereby the inability for the centre to monitor the local.
Responding to this dilemma, the Supreme People’s Court carries out a reform towards transparency. The mass publicity of court decisions, this article contends, is a top-down effort to address the principal-agent problem. By means of establishing a centralized judicial data collection system, the Supreme People’s Court can more directly control the information reporting process within the judicial hierarchy and reduce information asymmetry. By making mass local court decisions publicly available on a centralized venue, it attempts to curb wrongdoing and improve decision consistency and quality in local courts through public oversight. Together, the transparency reform helps the centre (i.e., the SPC) rein in local courts.
As in most principal-agent settings, agents, here local courts, responded strategically, by disclosing fewer decisions than required. After the Supreme People’s Court mandated judicial decision disclosure for courts in 2014, disclosure rates remained low, at 39.4%, 44.5%, and 47.9% in 2014, 2015, and 2016, respectively, with strong regional variations. For example, the disclosure rate of Tianjin in 2016 was about 71%, while that of Hainan was only 16%.
In the existing personnel arrangement, local governments control the appointment and promotion of judges. Yet an increasing number of provincial high courts are now presided over by judges or officials who have work experience at the SPC or other agencies of the central government. Our data shows that judicial decision disclosure rates increased at courts that were headed by cadres with work experience in the central government. We find that the presence of these cadres is associated with more than a 10 percent higher disclosure rate of judicial decisions by the respective court. This finding suggests that the dispatched judicial cadres were quite successful in promoting transparency of the courts in their jurisdictions according to central policy – just as they are in promoting other central policies.
The transparency reform is to be contextualized within other reforms toward a more centralized judicial sector in China. Local protectionism of courts, that is, courts serving local interests rather than following the law, is well documented in the literature. The requirement that all judgements be uploaded to the centralized website enables the SPC to supervise local courts’ behaviour not only through public oversight but also through steering legal development in a certain direction, and aligning local judicial decisions with its own policy goals. For example, the SPC can easily search for local judgements and check whether their decisions are consistent with judicial interpretations and guiding cases.
Lei Chen is Chair of International Arbitration and Chinese Law at Durham Law School, UK. He has been elected as a Titular Member of the International Academy of Comparative Law and a Fellow of the European Law Institute.
Zhuang Liu is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Hong Kong. His research interests include the role of the courts and judicial behaviour, as well as law and development. His work has appeared in several leading academic journals specialising in law, economics, and China studies.
Yingmao Tang is an Associate Professor at Peking University Law School. His research interests include international finance regulation, investment law and the Chinese judicial system. His recent work focuses on opening China’s capital markets, online judicial transparency and big data & computational legal studies.
Media outlets and government websites use cartoons to explain SCS practises
Much has been said and written about China’s Social Credit System (SCS). Stories about an almighty, high-tech surveillance dictatorship that rates its citizens are persistent in global media discourse while the image of an omnipresent and omnipotent social credit score already found its way into memes. An increasing number of observers debunk the horror stories with facts and point to the low-tech nature of most SCS projects. As unfounded as many social credit stories are, they have also fuelled a long-overdue debate outside of China about data protection and the power of assessments. In a proposal for an AI regulation, the European Union cast the imagined “social credit scoring” as antagonist.
Meanwhile, the social credit stories and their policy responses abroad overshadow the actual innovations and challenges that the SCS brings to governance in China. The SCS does not have the capacity to function as the Orwellian surveillance tool it is often depicted as, but that does not mean that it is less ambitious and transformative. Zooming in on one of the multiple innovations that emerge under the SCS’s overarching aim to engineer trust, we studied the architecture behind the systematic disclosure of information on the “untrustworthy” (失信人) and, in a second part, interrogate paths to relief for targeted subjects. Those who find themselves shamed as “untrustworthy” are almost exclusively persons who have violated laws and regulations or not fulfilled court orders, rather than persons who have breached unspecified moral norms, and consist overwhelmingly of companies rather than individuals. The SCS’s shaming practices are thus best contextualized within public regulation work. Our study finds that the SCS formalizes and elevates a concept of public regulation that is best conceptualized as reputational regulation to new prominence. Shaming as a regulatory tool is not new and has been applied by state agencies globally. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration of the USA for example routinely uses its Twitter account to shame companies that violated work safety rules. However, the SCS is the first central-level government strategy that systematically implements shaming schemes in all regulatory realms from transport to food safety and equips the practice with a clear rhetorical framework. Public disclosure of compliance assessments is also a common practice in emerging, transnational ESG regimes (Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance). The driving factors of both, the SCS’s reputational regulation scheme and global ESG regimes are similar: The aim to enforce norms of public interest in the absence of an efficient and comprehensive regulatory infrastructure.
We first identify three pillars of successful reputational regulation through a review of empirical and theoretical literature on reputational regulation and then point out how the SCS realizes them.
(1) In reputational regulation, the declared purpose of the information disclosure is to punish, rather than to increase government transparency or warn of dangers (e.g., from poisoned food products). The NDRC and PBoC stipulate blacklisting and the public sharing of information on trust-breaking in their 2022 list of SCS disciplinary measures. Both sanctions are reputational only, as the more tangible punishments that come with blacklisting, such as restrictions on market access and subsidies, are listed separately. Further, a plethora of core structural policies document the punitive purpose of disclosure, for instance the foundational Planning Outline on the Construction of a Social Credit System (2014-2020) calling to “give rein to the role of the masses in appraisal, discussion, criticism, and reports, shape social deterrence through social moral condemnation, and censure trust-breaking acts.”
(2) To ensure that the public and media generate the negative publicity necessary to pressure target subjects to change, a government agency engaging in reputational regulation needs to provoke this disapproval by embedding the disclosure within a moral message. The SCS endowed the existing disclosure strategy of dual publicity (双公示), which initially promoted disclosure of administrative punishment decisions to foster government transparency, with the trust-breaking rhetoric, making it part of the SCS toolkit. Negative social credit information technically consists merely of violations of laws and regulations and is not novel. The innovation brought by the SCS is to relabel selected categories of administrative information as “credit/trust information” and publicize them as such. To information recipients, the impression conveyed is that a violator of the law in one realm is overall untrustworthy. The trust rhetoric dominates all publication formats: Blacklists and disclosure platforms carry titles such as “seriously untrustworthy companies”.
(3) Finally, reputational regulation requires that the information must be brought to the attention of actors who are in a position to exert pressure on the deviator. A variety of dissemination channels amplified by a state-dominated media environment ensure that information on trust-breakers reaches far. Apart from online platforms and local government websites, public billboards, announcements at local festivities, television and radio broadcast, ringtone announcements and various apps inform about who has been designated untrustworthy. Credit service agencies also tap into social credit information.
To summarize, the SCS drives a type of information disclosure that is intended more to punish than to warn, comes with a negative moral message, and is disseminated to the public through various channels. Regulatory shaming is, however, notorious for infringing on target subjects’ rights. Chinese literature has described the publication of negative social credit information as a new type of reputational punishment (声誉罚). The agency loses control over the scope and intensity of punishment once information is published because the punitive action itself is carried out by others. Even if a target subject successfully objects to the publication of adverse information and the agency takes it down, the reputational damage can hardly be undone. The second part of our study discusses how targets of reputational punishment under the SCS can seek legal remedy.
There are three potential paths to relief for those adversely affected by SCS-driven regulatory shaming in China: administrative reconsideration (行政复议) and litigation, internal agency controls, and the SCS’s own mechanism of credit repair (信用修复). The prior two paths may provide more or less satisfying outcomes for conventional administrative penalties such as fines, in the case of shaming however, revoking the agency’s act means only ceasing publication. Reproductions of the negative information concerned in news outlets and other channels remain in place. Additional remedies such as apologies and compensation payments appear necessary but while the Administrative Litigation Law provides for such remedies, we could not find court decisions ordering such remedial measures in social credit-related cases.
Where subjects believe to be unlawfully designated “untrustworthy” and bring the claim to court, they frequently face the following issues:
Whom to sue?
It is often unclear which agency is to sue because a single SCS penalty can involve multiple state agencies. For example, a construction bureau in Jiangsu blacklisted a company for not paying wages to migrant workers, resulting in a different local agency acting on the information by restricting the company from public bidding. When the company sued the construction bureau, the court held that the bureau was not the defendant. It held that the correct defendant was instead the other agency that had punished the company. In other cases, the agency that administered the blacklist was held to be the correct addressee. The confusion over the correct defendant in litigation may be further exacerbated by the trend to outsource shaming work to industry associations.
Are social credit penalties litigable?
If it was confirmed that social credit shaming measures constitute administrative punishment, the Administrative Punishment Law (APL) would apply, subjecting the shaming regulators to a series of procedures such as notifying targets beforehand and offering them a chance to defend themselves. Is SCS-driven regulatory shaming an administrative punishment? No legislation to date has clearly addressed this question. Courts regularly deny arguments that any SCS penalties, including shaming, constitute administrative punishment. Some claims have been accepted nevertheless with courts defining the SCS measure as an administrative act that has affected the plaintiff’s rights, and on this basis examined whether this act had the legal basis it needs according to law. A legal basis may consist of SCS regulations and measures issued by sectoral regulators from the ministry level down to that of local municipal agencies. In rather exceptional decisions, courts held that central-level policy documents that were not translated into local rules do not suffice as a legitimate legal basis for a social credit penalty.
Are social credit penalties subject to procedural restrictions?
A growing number of SCS policy documents stipulate procedures for social credit penalties, which increasingly find their way into local law where they can be invoked by courts. For instance, many local and sectoral regulations stipulate a duty on the part of the regulatory agency to notify a person before entering her on a blacklist. The Jingyang District Court of Deyang City ordered an agency to delete a negative record because the agency failed to “inform the administrative counterpart of the administrative decision to be made and listen to the administrative counterpart’s statement and defence.”
Just information disclosure or a reputational penalty?
In most instances, remedies for social credit penalties are denied because social credit measures pose conceptual novelties to adjudicators. In particular, the courts have invoked the accessory nature of publication, the necessity for government transparency, and the political priority of SCS building to reject plaintiffs’ claims. For Tianheng Investment Construction Management Ltd. from Hangzhou for example, appearing on a list of untrustworthy companies for having submitted forged materials meant the de facto end of its business, at least for the stipulated publication period of twenty-four months. However, the courts of all three instances denied the company’s claim that the disclosure was punitive, holding instead that publication was part of the agency’s duty to objectively record and publicize their decisions. In other cases, the SCS goals of building a trustworthy society and market have been invoked by adjudicators to legitimize credit information recording, scoring, and publication practices. Lianfa Construction & Engineering Ltd. had won an initial case against a local housing agency which had, without legal basis, imposed a social credit penalty. However, the court of appeal overturned the ruling, insisting that the mechanism for disciplining law-violating and trust-breaking behaviour must be perfected. As Peking University Professor Chun Peng points out, in the larger mission of SCS building, courts are not just the guardians of lawful conduct of state agencies but also “vanguards of disciplinary measures for trust-breaking”.
Litigation does little to alleviate the damages ensuing from undue shaming for trust-breakers. The clumsiness of shaming measures and their irreversibility render them hardly controllable through the judiciary. Alternatively, control mechanisms within the information handling agency may prevent undue damages. Only the ability to object prior to publication can provide an effective safeguard against wrongful shaming sanctions, and agency rules on social credit information lay down the procedures that lead to publication. However, no solution to effectively overseeing such procedural rules in the absence of judicial review has surfaced.
Finally, where target subjects admit guilt, they may obtain relief from shaming through the reintegrative path of credit repair. Credit is repaired and respective negative information publication halted if subjects correct untrustworthy conduct and eliminate negative impact, make credit commitments, participate in charitable activities, and/or undergo educational training, depending on the relevant sectoral and local credit repair mechanism. Credit repair is not strictly a remedial path as it does not operate on the premise of agency mistakes and in practice remains porous. However, with credit repair’s concept to function as a reintegrative path comes an innovation that has the potential to resolve the irreversibility of shaming: In some credit repair programs, instead of deleting the original negative record, that record is supplemented by a record of repair clearly explaining the reason for the repair and the final assessment.
Reputational regulation remains a work in progress. But is it effective? Other than traditional enforcement tools of state agencies such as fines, reputational regulation requires the cooperation of non-state actors, in this case, the shaming community which has to act upon disclosed information and exert pressure on the shamed subject. Initial studies found that company representatives across China believe reputational harm from negative publicity to be one of the key concerns with regard to the SCS. However, more research is needed to assess under which circumstances and to whom the disclosure of information on trust-breaking is relevant.
Marianne von Blomberg is a Research Associate at Bern University of Applied Sciences, Institute for Global Management, and is currently completing a PhD with Cologne University’s Chair for Chinese Legal Culture and Zhejiang University’s Guanghua Law School. Her research revolves around social credit regimes in China and beyond, assessment-based public regulation, and data governance. In her dissertation, she explores how the Social Credit System project in China strengthens, weakens, and transforms the law. She holds an LL.M in Chinese Law from Zhejiang University and a BA in Communication, Culture and Management from Zeppelin University. She can be contacted via Twitter @mariannehuashan or email at m.vonblomberg[at]uni-koeln.de.
Haixu Yu is a Research Associate and doctoral student of the Chair of Chinese Legal Culture. He passed the national judicial examination of the People’s Republic of China in 2014. His research interests include Chinese judicial reform and Chinese public law. Before studying in the University of Cologne, HaixuYu graduated from the Chinese University of Political Science and Law in 2018, where he received LL.M degree, majoring in Chinese economic law and fiscal law. He received his LL.B. and B.A. degree in 2015 also at China University of Political Science and Law.
