A change of perspective

This book seeks to participate in the study of global legal thought by examining ideological conflicts in Chinese legal scholarship. More specifically, it studies arguments about the so-called “rule of law,” which is nowadays often translated into Chinese as 法治. Scholarship on the rule of law is vast, both in China and abroad, and the concept has been declared passé on many occasions during the past decades. This book attempts to present a modest perspective change to the study of the rule of law phenomenon. First, it seeks to describe the internal dynamics of the Chinese rule of law discourse, instead of comparing Chinese conceptions of the rule of law to one or another external standard. To this end, it examines ideological divisions within Chinese legal academia, as well as their relationship to legal theoretical arguments about the rule of law. The book describes the argumentative strategies used by Chinese legal scholars to legitimize and subvert China's state-sanctioned rule of law ideology, and it examines the efforts of Chinese legal scholars to articulate alternative rule of law conceptions. In addition to this descriptive project, this book advances a more general argument about the rule of law phenomenon. On the highest level of generalization, and with certain far-reaching qualifications, it insists that many interventions in the rule of law discourse are better seen in terms of their performative qualities rather than as analytic propositions, descriptive statements or as good faith arguments about the nature of the rule of law. In order to illustrate this argument, this book demonstrates that various paradoxical, contradictory and otherwise implausible arguments about the rule of law discourse play an important role in the Chinese debate about the rule of law.