The Chinese language is known for its evocative sayings, one of which – 青出于蓝而胜于蓝 – very nicely captures the sentiment I wish to convey in this short foreword marking the publication of Samuli Seppänen's book Ideological Conflict and the Rule of Law in Contemporary China: Useful Paradoxes. Drawn from the writing of the philosopher Xunzi (approximately 310–235 BCE), a somewhat textualist translation of this phrase would read that “the blue that emerges from the indigo plant is even bluer than the plant itself,” with the larger meaning being an acknowledgment that the scholar in question has surpassed those with whom he studied.

Useful Paradoxes represents an extraordinary achievement. Its genesis lay in Samuli's skepticism, informed by critical legal theory, of the pieties surrounding liberal legality and of associated conventional understandings of the idea of the rule of law. This gnawing intellectual curiosity led Samuli first to look toward China, with its abundance of self-proclaimed efforts to reimagine what a rule of law might be in the hope of finding alternative understandings capable of resolving such tensions. The very scrupulousness that drove this undertaking, however, kept Samuli from easily resting content – and so, unable to find what he had thought he might from the writings of leading Chinese thinkers of the day, Samuli next took it upon himself to decamp to China, there personally and at length to engage a host of the most important and innovative thinkers about law in the contemporary PRC.

Samuli's exploration did not yield what he would consider a normatively or conceptually preferable alternative vision of what a rule of law might be – but it did lead to a groundbreaking study of the range and character of contemporary Chinese legal thought. Useful Paradoxes deserves praise for the empathetic but rigorous manner in which it delves deeply and deftly into the thinking of a bevy of major and quite varied thinkers in law, including, but not limited to, such major figures as Cui Zhiyuan, Deng Zhenglai, He Weifang, Ji Weidong, Jiang Shigong, Li Buyun, Luo Gan, Sun Guohua, Wang Liming and Zhu Suli. There is no better critical guide in a western language to the leading figures in early twenty-first century legal thought in China.