On the one hand, the discourse of the rule of law is always linked to legal orientalism. The East, which is studied as the “other” of the West, is conceived as despotic with a system of human domination in which people are unable to appreciate ideas of democracy, individual rights or the rule of law. Respect for international norms, i.e. the adoption of a Euro-American system of the rule of law, is fundamental on its path to modernity, whose “signal marker” is the emergence of real law (Ruskola, 6). Although the rule of law is almost universally recognized as a goal of legal reform, the legal community has not yet reached agreement on what it actually entails. Legal theorists have developed several definitions of the rule of law, ranging from “thin” to “thick” to “substantial” “instrumentalist” versions. Comparative law, Chinese law, comparative method, comparative politics, postcolonial theory, Chinese translation of legal orientalism, auto-orientalism, legal orientalism, oriental legalism Since the Opium War, China has gone to great lengths to learn from the West, including establishing and reforming its legal system to date. In particular, the Republics of China (“RoC”) under the Guomindang (“GMD”) designed a scientific legal system modeled on the European tradition of civil law and invited American jurists such as Roscoe Pound to advise for this reform. RoC had a different agenda behind the reform, such as receiving continued financial and military support from the US government and “overcoming longstanding Orientalist prejudices and showing that China was indeed capable of building a system of rule of law” (Ruskola, 201). In this sense, the Republic of the Congo considers the Western rule of law to be exemplary, as a model to be copied and imitated. Despite the radically different political rivalry and ruling ideologies that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has compared to those of the GMDs, contemporary China under the CCP seems to have adopted a similar perception of the rule of law.

As Ruskola put it, China has “judged” itself, meaning that it has been incorporated into the modern international legal system,(28) partly and probably mainly because of China`s “self-orientalization” efforts, usually by joining the WTO. The rule of law as a desirable system becomes clearer when the CCP incorporated the principle of the rule of law into the 1999 constitution and made it an official government policy. The People`s White Paper on the Rule of Law, issued by the Council of State, does not hesitate to use the rule of law as a symbol of the development of political civilization and the crystallization of “human wisdom”. desired and persecuted by the peoples of all countries” (Ruskola, 198). The first Sino-American treaty of 1844 allowed the extraterritorial application of U.S. law in a supposedly anarchic China. As a form of legal imperialism, this practice began long before U.S. territorial colonialism after the Spanish-American War of 1898 and found its full expression in the jurisdiction of a U.S. district court over the “District of China.” With urgent contemporary implications, legal orientalism lives on in the continuing damage inflicted on the U.S. Constitution by the anti-Chinese immigration laws of the late nineteenth century, and in the self-orientalizing reforms of Chinese law today. In global trade and human rights politics, legal orientalism continues to shape modern subjectivities, institutions, and geopolitics in powerful and unrecognized ways. In summary, the provincialization of corporate law in the United States is a recognition that it is essentially specific.

Understanding its wording requires context, just as Chinese family law must be understood and interpreted. Corporate law in the United States is nothing more than a solution to the common social and legal conundrums faced by people of all cultures and regions, and a component of global legal history and development. These two legal systems, as different as they may seem, operate in such a way that they adapt to the particular needs and problems of a particular society within a certain period of time. Several functional similarities are identified as follows. Legal orientalism is also a concept that reflects the cultural distance between East and West. In the post-cold-war period, the law became widespread and was considered a universally applicable institution; The close link between the Western political order and the rule of law, in turn, makes the liberal democratic order universal. Culture is special by nature because they are scattered and have no common characteristic. The specificity of the Chinese system therefore depends on its position in relation to liberal culture.

Nevertheless, Ruskola indicates a popular definition, i.e. “. A rule of rules: a system of neutrally administered legal sanctions and incentives that form the basis of an orderly modern society” (14). It is widely accepted because it sets minimum requirements for any rule of law system: a set of reasonably identifiable rules and the institution capable of applying those laws in a reasonably consistent manner (Ruskola, 162). In other literatures, it is also called the “thin” version of the rule of law. The case of exclusion of the Chinese and those adopted by Congress at the end of the 19th century. Anti-Chinese immigration laws are typical examples of how legal orientalism as a legal fact helps justify the exclusion of Chinese immigrants. It was believed that Chinese immigrants were incapable of governing themselves and cherishing the individual rights and rule of law demanded by the republican form of government of the United States. Ruskola then goes beyond the epistemological level and considers the material practice of legal orientalism. The US did not establish colonies in China, as the European imperialists did during the Opium War. But the signing of the Treaty of Wanghia between China and the US, one of many disparate treaties China had to sign at the time, triggered indirect US imperialism in China – the treaty allows the extraterritorial jurisdiction of US law to be applied to US citizens in China.

Caleb Cushing, the mastermind of this treaty, successfully justified it with the rhetoric of legal orientalism, arguing that it would be shameful and humiliating for the United States to submit to Chinese jurisdiction, which Europeans have described as despotic and arbitrary. Since then, the United States has transformed itself from a victim of European imperialism into a global defender of the institutionalization of the Anglo-American legal order in the East. My book Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law (Harvard University Press 2013) was published in translation in China in 2016. This essay analyzes the Chinese reception of this book. Originally intended for a North American readership, Legal Orientalism critically examines the asymmetrical relationship between Euro-American law and Chinese law, with the former seeing itself as the embodiment of universal values, while the latter is seen as culturally special. The essay examines what happens when a “Western” work of self-criticism is transmitted to an “Eastern” audience. In this context, he analyzes the politics of self-orientalism, Eastern legalism and the comparative method. Instead, by proving U.S. corporate law, we would see that the typical altruistic and paternalistic elements of Chinese law are in fact nothing more than what is usually associated with family obligations, and these characteristics can be found in any type of corporate law in any jurisdiction. U.S.

corporate law assumes that corporations are an aggregation of individual entities formulated through a relationship of contracts. Traditional Chinese enterprises are generally perceived as collective entities operating under Confucian ideology in pursuit of the collective good. As Ruskola eloquently put it, “The orientalist history of Chinese law is one in which kinship overwhelms the entire system and seems to displace even the conceptual possibility of enterprise as a legal form.” (L. 85) Such a comparison inevitably leads to a scenario in which Chinese family law for clan companies is positioned in relation to US corporate law, with the conclusion that the respective Chinese family law must be analyzed in the light of the “universal” discourse on corporate law. Therefore, Chinese family law is understood through the prism of legal orientalism, but at the same time misunderstood. Second, both legal systems are structured on the basis of an altruistic assumption. Since Confucianism treats the family as one body, it is believed that heads of families in China are inherently capable of subordinating their selfish desires to the good of the family and community, and are therefore infallible. Similarly, directors and officers are responsible for managing the affairs of the Corporation in the best interests of shareholders. Typically, the “rule of commercial judgment” is formulated with an underlying assumption, namely that individuals can act selflessly to promote the greater good of society. Ruskola derives the term “legal orientalism” from postcolonial literature from “orientalism,” a pejorative perception of the Western East, and focuses on the legal aspects of this discourse. To use his own words: “Thus, at the most general level, with the term juridical orientalism, I refer to a series of interlocking narratives about what is right and what is not, and who are its real subjects and who are not” (Ruskola, 5). Tracing the history of US extraterritorial jurisdiction and indirect imperialism in China, Ruskola analyzes how the West began to treat Chinese “law” as the subject of its comparative study, how this comparative knowledge then circulated globally and, over time, morphed into a belief and regime of legal institutions that had different effects in different historical contexts.

Generated. (10) Second, ambiguous definitions make this terminology neutral and therefore politically attractive – the rule of law is desired and propagated by all governments, however radically different it may be in the ideological spectrum.