The rule of law in China

Professor Simon F. Deakin (Professor of Law, Director of the Centre for Business Research, and co-Chair of the Strategic Research Initiative in Public Policy, University of Cambridge; Fellow, Peterhouse, Cambridge) will deliver a lecture on the rule of law in China. The lecture will be followed by a question and answer session.

From 2013 until shortly before the start of the Covid crisis in 2019, I was able to carry out fieldwork in China, exploring changing attitudes to legality, and take part in workshops run by Chinese law schools and research institutes on the rule of law.  It is hardly necessary to say that the ‘rule of law’ is a contested concept; in China, as elsewhere, it has given rise to a rich literature in legal theory.  My focus here is less on this jurisprudential literature, and more on the practice of legality as it affects social and commercial life in China.  Defining the ‘rule of law’ sociologically as ‘a state of affairs in which legal rules are seen as inherently authoritative’ makes it possible to explore the origins of such a practice and its consequences for, among other things, sustainable development.  I will present a case study on the use of China’s insolvency laws following the Wenzhou ‘curb crisis’ of 2011.  Wenzhou is a particularly interesting case, as a commercial centre with a centuries-long tradition of trust-based contracting.  How the new insolvency law was applied in the aftermath of financial crisis illustrates ways in which the formal and the informal economies inter-penetrate and overlap in today’s China.

Simon Deakin is a law professor at Cambridge, specialising in labour, private and corporate law, and director of the interdisciplinary Centre for Business Research within the Cambridge Judge Business School.  His books include The Law of the Labour Market (with Frank Wilkinson), Hedge Fund Activism in Japan: The Limits of Shareholder Primacy (with John Buchanan and Dominic Chai) and Is Law Computable? (with Chris Markou).  He is editor in chief of the Industrial Law Journal and an editor of the Cambridge Journal of Economics.

This is one of the events in the on-going China Forum Seminar series, hosted by the China Forum, Jesus College. The seminars, given by eminent speakers, cover a broad range of topics and disciplines.

Booking

This is a virtual seminar. Attendance is free. Advance booking is required by emailing: china-forum@jesus.cam.ac.uk.  Priority will be given to members of Jesus College and the University of Cambridge.