Legal Culture and Legal system in Chinese Society

The course consists of three overlapping sections: 1. A short introduction to the political system of China. The most crucial aspect of successful dealing with China or Chinese actors is to understand the role of the Communist Party and its developmental policies (both legal and economic). 2. Exploration on the Constitution, constitutional discussion and role of Constitution in China’s legal system, society and politics. We will explore both the official Party line narrative of the Constitution, the recent Constitutional amendment in analyzing the underlying political and cultural argumentations for the amendments. In addition, we will explore the domestic Chinese critique of the Constitutional amendments and explore the reasoning of the critique. In addition, students need to read and analyze the Constitution of the Communist Party and to understand the role of the Party Constitution within Chinese judicial system and legal practices. Hence, we analyze law and legal practices in China from a dualistic perspective. On the one hand, we analyze the Constitution as a normative structure that dictates the state structure, roles, responsibilities and function of key political institutions of China (including individual rights and responsibilities). On the other hand, we study how the Party utilizes its actual power in shaping and determining the practices of the key institutions and individual people in China – in particular to the world shaking case of Corona virus. 3. We also study how the actual holistic systemic imperatives are reflected in actual daily judicial work at the regional level. In this section we will on the hand, explore how the court system function both as a bureaucratic and legal organization, how it is closely entangled with local level development policies and political system. On the other hand, we will gain an insight how the regional level judicial and regulative environment condition differently foreign actors within China and what role the personal networks (guanxi) have in this process. Hence, this section will shed some light on contracting and negotiation cultures of China providing some hands-in clues on how to make sense of the central and local level regulative concepts and how to tackle the Chinese negotiation practices.