Chinese Law Prof Blog

Where Gu Kailai will likely spend her time: China's Club Fed

Here's a profile of Qincheng (秦城) Prison, where high-ranking prisoners stay and where the cognoscenti figure Gu Kailai will go (assuming she's not spirited off to a nice tropical island somewhere).

Ricci dictionary of Chinese law (French/English/Chinese) seeks English proofreaders

Here's a communication I recently received on what sounds like a worthy project:

The Ricci Dictionary of Chinese Law is a trilingual Chinese law dictionary project (Chinese to English / Chinese to French) which is currently ran by a team of practicing and academic lawyers with various legal backgrounds. It is part of a wider dictionary project, the “Grand Ricci” which is the reference Chinese to French dictionary and one of the world’s most complete Chinese to foreign language dictionaries (approx. 13,500 Chinese characters and more than 300,000 terms).

Our project started six years ago and recently reached an advanced stage with more than 23,000 Chinese legal terms listed and translated in both English and French.We are looking for native English speakers to proofread the English translations for these entries. Proofreading will be carried using an online editing tool (web database). Candidates must ideally possess or be in the process of completing a law degree and should be familiar with Chinese legal terms. Ability to read French would be a must. Compensation is to be discussed and will depend on the availability of the candidate.

If you are interested, please submit your resume to Hubert BAZIN, project coordinator (hubert.bazin (at) gmail.com).

Hot spots of labor unrest in China

Here's the chart (HT: China Law Blog).

China-EU Law Journal: Call for papers

I have received this call for papers from the China-EU Law Journal. The accompanying email states:

The China-EU Law Journal is a peer-reviewed journal. It is published by Springer under the auspices of the China-EU Law School at the China University of Political Science and Law.

 For manuscript submission and more information you may visit www.editorialmanager.com/celj

Blogging hiatus

Apologies for the recent hiatus in blog posts. I've been quite busy working on a paper. I have neither forgotten nor given up on this blog, however. Please stay tuned.

Legal knowledge in propaganda posters

The Dutch sinologist Prof. Stefan Landsberger has amassed a huge collection of Chinese propaganda posters. Check out the law-related material here. Particularly quaint is the picture of the upright official turning down a bribe of two bottles of liquor and some cigarettes. Nowadays even the official's amah would be insulted at such a pathetic bribe.

Chinese legal history quotation of the week

As for the "ling-ch'ih," otherwise called the "slow and painful," or "slicing process," my friend said it was "really not so bad as people thought ...."

Sir Henry Evan Murchison James, The Long White Mountain: A Journey in Manchuria (1888), p. 158.

I've been asked to post the following announcement.

New Master of European and International Law in China at the China-EU School of Law in Beijing

(Click here for brochure)

-Law students with international ambitions and an interest in China can now pursue their law studies through a Master of European and International Law (LL.M.) at the newly established China-EU School of Law (CESL) in Beijing. 

The one-year Master Programme taught in English not only covers a broad spectrum of European and international law, but also includes a comprehensive introduction to Chinese law.

Interested students can apply for the 2010/2011 Programme through the CESL website by April 20th.

In the past 30 years China has become the world’s third largest economy with most global companies operating on the Chinese market. At the same time the Chinese legal system is in a state of ongoing reform and rapid development. As a consequence, the demand for legal professionals who combine a high command of European and international law with a special expertise in Chinese legal matters is rising.

-The Master Programme in European and International Law at the China-EU School of Law offers the unique opportunity to acquire this highly sought-after legal expertise – within a very international and challenging environment. The unique feature of the law school is the international faculty from 15 renowned partner universities from Europe and China. All professors are prominent experts in their specialised area of expertise.

-Chinese law courses are mainly taught by professors from one of the top law universities in China, the China University of Political Science and Law (CUPL).

-The China-EU School of Law, a joint project of the Chinese Government and the European Union, is located in the north of Beijing.

-The tuition fee for one year amounts to 60.000 RMB (about 6.000 EUR) for the whole programme. Various scholarships are available.

-Students interested in attending the 2010/2011 Master Programme can find more information as well as online application forms on the CESL website: www.cesl.edu.cn.

Chinese law on the iPhone

Not, regrettably, this blog, but the China Law Blog. You can download the app from the iTunes store here. While I can't speak to the technical quality of the app, I can highly recommend the content.

My China-side blog rehabilitated

As mysteriously as they took it down, Sina.com has restored my blog on their web site (essentially a mirror of this blog), so it's now accessible again from within China. Here's an interesting index of what's sensitive and what's not: the posts on Liu Xiaobo have been deleted, but the posts on Akmal Shaikh remain.

Comment policy

Something about anonymity seems to encourage nastiness and abusive sarcasm in comments that make them very unpleasant to read. (This is true for all blogs with comment functions, not just this one.) If there is some intellectual content to the comment I don't want to censor it, but please note that I am more likely to do so if you remain anonymous. Attaching your name to your comment has, I think, a civilizing influence. And why not take some responsibility for what you write, unless you have genuine grounds for believing it will get you arrested or something like that? In general, I would ask commenters to re-read their comment after finishing it and ask themselves, "Would I want to have this person at my dinner party?"

List of foreign law firms in China

I just came across this list (in Chinese) compiled by the Ministry of Justice and dated Dec. 24, 2009, so it's probably the most up-to-date list in existence. There are 188 of them.

Chinese translation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act

Who knows? This might be useful to someone, somewhere (perhaps in explaining why you can't give a gift, even though personally you'd really love to), so here it is, courtesy of the US Department of Commerce.

Tsinghua China Law Review: call for submissions

I have received the following announcement, which may be of interest to readers. (I confess I am puzzled by their claim to be "the first law journal in China".) (Oct. 20 update: I am informed that they meant to say, "the first student-run law journal in China".)

TSINGHUA CHINA LAW REVIEW, CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:

Introduction

The Tsinghua China Law Review is the first law journal in China and is
in association with Tsinghua University School of Law in Beijing,
China.  The TCLR is an English-language academic journal aimed at a
global audience, publishing articles on legal topics relating to
China.  The TCLR Board of Editors is a collaborative effort between
foreign students in the Tsinghua LLM Program in Chinese Law and
Chinese students at the Tsinghua School of Law.  The journal follows a
U.S. law journal format.  It is published bi-annually and distributed
to subscribers in the U.S., China, and throughout the world.

Call for Submissions

The TCLR is currently seeking high-quality scholarly articles for its
upcoming issue.  Articles should be original works of legal analysis
on topics relating to Chinese law or other legal issues that pertain
to China.  Citations are required for all points of law, assertions of
fact, or references to other works.  Citations should be in footnotes
and formatted in accordance with the Bluebook
(http://www.legalbluebook.com).

Articles may be submitted by email, in Word format, to
TsinghuaCLR@gmail.com or in hard copy, along with a CD-ROM electronic
copy, to the Tsinghua School of Law.  Kindly email the preceding
address for postal information.   Submitted articles will be
considered on a rolling basis.

A Note on the Language of Publication

The main body of articles should be written in English.  However,
Chinese-language legal terminology, citations, or references to laws
or other original sources may be provided in Chinese, and will be
translated by the TCLR editorial staff.  In addition, for articles
that regularly reference Chinese-language laws or other materials, the
TCLR editorial staff will translate the materials to English so that
they may be included as appendices to the article for publication.

Courtney L. Gould
court.gould@gmail.com

The legal job market in Asia

Here's a blog post on this subject from Above The Law. HT: China Law Blog.

Legal knowledge propagation in China

A colleague who wishes to remain anonymous has kindly directed me this Flickr site where he/she maintains a fascinating archive of photos from China relating (mostly) to state efforts to propagate knowledge about the legal system.

The origin of ping pong

I started this blog with the intention of making and keeping a promise to readers that I would blog only about Chinese law and not waste their time with self-indulgent ramblings on other topics. I'm going to go off topic here, but only to present something that will be of interest to all sinologists: a marvelous account of the origins of ping pong by Alice Lyman Miller of the Hoover Institution (posted here with permission) that might otherwise never be broadly circulated.

The “game” called ping-pong is, of course, Chinese in origin, though it depends in part on what we mean by “Chinese” and “China.” The earliest references are in the Chunqiu 春秋 and seem to locate the invention of what becomes ping-pong in the state of Chu 楚, to the south of the emergent states on the Yellow River plain. Chu, of course, was seat of an alternative cultural strain, in some ways startlingly different from the millet and wheat-based cultures to the north, but also sharing unmistakable elements in common. Not surprisingly, therefore, aspects of the game in its earliest form both reflect Chu’s cultural dissonances with the northern plain cultures but also had lasting impact on the game in later times, when the game because embraced as a core element of the civilization we call “Chinese.”. Thus the game’s name “ping-pong” (rendered awkwardly as “pingpang” in what in later imperial times became the Mandarin dialect) is actually an abundantly true rendition via onomapoesis of the game’s characteristic sound in the Chu dialect of the 7th century BCE. This may surprise contemporary observers since “ping-pong” sounds nothing at all like the sound of the modern plastic sphere volleyed in modern manifestations of the game. But in the earliest phases of the game’s development, players volleyed dried lichee, whose sound is quite disarmingly and precisely captured in the term *tsyik *tsyuk, as carefully reconstructed by Herbert Giles, Bernard Karlgren, and most recently Peter Boodberg.

Other early references confirm the Chu genesis of the game. Sunzi 孙子 must have observed several matches among champions from Chu against challengers in Wu 吴and Yue 越 because he wrote about them and the tactics they deployed in state-sponsored matches in his classic text 孙子乒乓法. To clarify the confusion that often attends this classic in modern times, it bears repeating here that scholars and commentators in later and even contemporary periods failed to recognize that the term 兵 is a contraction—or more properly, an elision--used conventionally by Han scholars (thus, the Erya 爾雅, the Shuowen jiezi 说文解字, Mei Yizuo’s 1615 lexicon 字彙, and the 1711 Peiwen yunfu 佩文韵府, though curiously not the Kangxi zidian 康熙字典) of the original 乒乓, and concluded erroneously that Sunzi was describing warfare. A sarcastic tip of the hat again to May Fourth era cultural iconoclasm and its present-day legacy in the education policies of the PRC, for which—pace Gu Jiegang—we have one more tragic instance of how contemporary Chinese have lost touch with their own intellectual and cultural traditions

I will leave it to others to address the longstanding controversy over the game’s transmission westward, evidently forgotten now by many, during the Six Dynasties era, as reflected in the sculptures and frescoes at Dunhuang and points west in the Turfan Basin and beyond. By this time, of course, the game had already acquired the characteristic features of a religious discipline evident in its adherents even today. These, of course, derived ultimately from the sexual shamanism of Chu Daoism (as any judicious reading of Qu Yuan’s Lisao 离骚 will confirm) and were consolidated by its association with the neo-Daoist sects of Chang’an under Sixteen Kingdoms period.  The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove were famous in their time as avid players. The legend that they had their servants follow them always with a jug of wine and a shovel (to inspire their rounds of poetry and to bury them on the spot if they keeled over dead during one of the drinking sessions) has numerous recorded variations that state that what their servants always carried with them were a jug of wine and a paddle, not a shovel.

The game’s religious disciplinary aspects are manifest even today in the intense focus of the individual player on the present moment (angular and linear) of the ball, her dispassionate repose as the ball approaches from across the net, and her return of the ball with a clean, unadorned stroke supremely efficient in its accord with the effortless minimalism consistent with shi 勢 and in conformity with the underlying organizing force of 道.

The game was already well established in the Central Asian oases in the 7th century, when Tang armies encountered it flourishing among the Nestorian communities of the region, and some of the Tocharian texts preserved from that time have recently been shown not to be Christian tracts at all, as was long thought, but actually to have been scorecards from tournaments begun during the era of Tanggut domination and continued thereafter. By the 8th century, the game had already begun to spread, via Moslem trade routes, to India, Persia, and ultimately to the West.

The one thing for which the West can claim credit, if that’s the right term, is the ungainly and ugly tennis grip used almost universally by clumsy Western adepts. Why this peculiar variation has endured, despite its demonstrated inferiority and its clearcut violation of the Daoist precepts that inspired the game from its earliest stages, is something of a mystery. Perhaps it has something to do with the “strategic culture” of Western civilization—its force-on-force predilections, its excessive reliance on technology to the neglect of technique, and other differences that David Brooks may elucidate.

Photo series: female capital convicts just before execution

Here is a somewhat ghoulish set of photographs posted on the Duowei forum site entitled "The Execution Process of Beautiful Capital Convicts" (美女死刑犯被处决过程). I can't vouch for their authenticity or even their approximate dates. I post them with a bit of hesitation, but if they are authentic then their informational value outweighs their prurient appeal.

JULY 19th UPDATE: Flora Sapio, an expert in this field, has some comments that are too important to be left, probably unnoticed, in the "Comments" section:

Somewhat ghoulish but very interesting nonetheless. Difficult to tell the genuine from the fake ones. Some of them raise some doubts. For instance, some of the people portrayed wear PAP uniforms. To my knowledge, the PAP seldom parades criminals. Besides some of the women in the pictures are simply too well dressed, while others look too relaxed. Also notice the "binding technique" that they used on the criminals. Too complicated. Compare it to the one that can be seen in pictures published by the Renmin Ribao and other official websites. Don't know. It would require a bit of time analyse these pictures. Also, one would need to known when they were taken, and in which province.

Revised document on Chinese LLM degrees for foreigners

Last week I posted here on Chinese LLM degrees for foreigners. As some useful comments have come in response to that, I'm posting a revised document; please use this one (Version 2) instead.

Chinese LLM degrees for foreigners

Some time ago, a discussion on the Chinalaw list about LLMs for foreigners (typically English-language) offered by Chinese institutions prompted me to ask for those with views on the subject to write to me so I could assemble a document that would answer questions that often came up.

Here's the result; hope it's useful to all.

MAY 26 UPDATE: I have posted a revised document here.