2.1. Western scholarship on Chinese legal history

The debate on whether there is such a thing as “law” in China has never really stopped. Nearly 50 years after Edward Said's groundbreaking critique on Orientalist thinking (Said, Reference Said1978), 30 years after William Alford's critique of Western historians and social scientists for their “slighting of Chinese law” (Alford, Reference Alford1997, p. 400), and 10 years after Ruskola's influential monograph “Legal Orientalism” (Ruskola, Reference Ruskola2013), this question still looms like a “spectre” haunting Western legal research on Chinese law.Footnote ¹² This ongoing debate is particularly relevant for the present study, as it has been stimulated by the common practice of looking at the law through the lens of nation–state centred approaches and their historical trajectories.

In its early stage, and with limited access to Chinese archives, scholarship on Chinese legal history in the 1960s primarily focused on the analysis of normative documents, its issuing institutions, and legal doctrines (see Bodde and Morris, Reference Bodde and Morris1967; Van der Sprenkel, Reference Van der Sprenkel1962). One of the groundbreaking works on Chinese legal history was Derk Bodde's and Clarence Morris's Law in Imperial China, Exemplified by 190 Ch'ing Dynasty Cases (1967). For research on the history of administrative law in ancient China, the thorough discussion by Metzger (Reference Metzger1973) provided very innovative observations of the administrative system of Qing bureaucracy. Additionally, accomplished scholars such as Frank Münzel dedicated their research to a better understanding of Chinese legal terminology and proper translation into foreign languages. Administrative law in the People's Republic of China (hereafter “PRC”) and, in general, the intersection of law and society received considerable scholarly attention, including renowned scholars such as Robert Heuser, Jerome A. Cohen, and Stanley B. Lubman.Footnote ¹³ During the 1970s, Harvard became the knowledge centre of Chinese legal studies in the United States, including research projects and teaching on Chinese contemporary law and legal history (Lubman, Reference Lubman1983, pp. 84–85).Footnote ¹⁴ Twenty years later, not Harvard, but Los Angeles became the “epicentre” of an “intellectual earthquake” (Diamant, Reference Diamant2001, p. 546). Back then, the newly founded UCLA research group under the leadership of Philipp C. Huang and Kathryn Bernhardt was committed to departing from the Western misrepresentations of Chinese law (You, Reference You2013, p. 167). Their China-centred narration of Chinese legal history was characterized by a strong bottom-up approach, newly exploring the judicial archives and persuing a broader social, political and intellectual contextualization of late imperial and Republican law (Alford, Reference Alford1997, p. 409).Footnote ¹⁵ This was an approach only feasible given the newly available archival materials, such as the one provided by the First Historical Archives of China in Beijing (hereafter “FHAC”) (中国第一历史档案馆). While Beatrice Bartlett (Bartlett, Reference Bartlett1981, p. 81), during her visit to Beijing in September 1974, was not allowed to access the Qing archive, 20 years later Nancy Park and Robert Antony wrote the following on the occasion of the opening of the FHAC: “[…] the research potential of Qing law […] [is] limitless, and the possibilities are enhanced by a wealth of virtually untapped primary and archival sources” (Park and Anthony, Reference Park and Antony1993, p. 93).Footnote ¹⁶ As for the study of the history of (ancient) Chinese administrative law, I consider the work of Bradly Reed (UCLA research group) to be particularly relevant. In his monograph, Talons and Teeth: County Clerks and Runners in the Qing Dynasty, Reed analyses hundreds of local administrative documents of the Yamen office in Ba County, Sichuan (Reed, Reference Reed2000). Reed's investigation on the daily practices of Yamen clerks and runners, and how they operated “[…] a fully integrated system of local administration” (Reed, Reference Reed2000, p. 5), provides a model case to implement the knowledge-historical approach of this article.Footnote ¹⁷ Through Reed's study we can explore the critical role of Yamen staff as a non-elite group in contrast to the Qing literati as crucial local knowledge actors to produce normative knowledge that would allow them to exercise an extra-statutory system of administration. This included their local expertise on practices to form “non-rational” associations based on “[…] kinship bonds, patron–client ties, and factional formations” (Reed, Reference Reed2000, p. 12). Additionally, Reed observed the authorisation of formalised legal knowledge in the form of centralised regulations that were issued by the official Qing institutions to regulate local administration (Reed, Reference Reed2000, p. 12).Footnote ¹⁸ This observation displays the need for a framework to analyse multiple forms of knowledge of normativity and related practices within a larger context, which I frame as “historical regimes of normativity with regard to administrative accountability, governance and legality.”Footnote ¹⁹

The 1990s marked a turning point for a new interdisciplinary research approach to Chinese legal history, assembling historians, sinologists, sociologist, and lawyers. Following this new path of Western studies on Chinese legal history, the haunting spectre of Orientalism became a target object of many scholars, including Teemu Ruskola and Donald Clark. Ruskola's monograph on the history of Legal Orientalism marked the beginning of what became an ongoing effort of Western investigation on this subject, entailing a “global history of China” (Ruskola, Reference Ruskola2013, p. 11). Ruskola conducted his study through the lens of American and Chinese law by observing legal mechanisms, the intellectual history of Chinese legality, as well as the global travelling of ideas of Euro–American law and its influence on the discussed concepts. His concept of Legal Orientalism has recently been the object of critical reviews by Donald Clarke and Thomas Coendet's critical stance on legal Orientalism, enhancing debates on the definition of “Orientalism,” “Anti-Orientalists,” and on whether or not an “un-Orientalist” analysis is possible after all (Coendet, Reference Coendet2019; Clarke, Reference Clarke2020; Ruskola's response in Ruskola, Reference Ruskola2022; Clarke's response thereof in Clarke, Reference Clarke2022). While Ruskola approaches Orientalism as “[…] a condition of knowledge with which we must live” (Ruskola, Reference Ruskola2022, p. 871), Coendet sees opportunities to escape this “Orientalist verdict” by his conception of the Western “conscientious subject” that is aware of the fact “[…] that its legal concepts are local knowledge and shares a critical awareness of their Orientalist legacy” (Coendet, Reference Coendet2019, pp. 799, 823). These raised questions and critical approaches are not reserved for comparative legal studies to discuss. Legal history likewise must be aware of the “dark sides” of Western reflections on “[…] the value of Western law's particular rationality in modern society.”Footnote ²⁰

2.2. Imagining Chinese law, Max Weber, and traditional methods of European legal history

Western legal historians engaging with “Oriental” legal traditions such as China's need to be conscious of the multiple encounters and entanglements between Western and Chinese genealogies of law as well as its intellectual path dependencies. This includes deconstructing the role of ideas and intellectual concepts that established a universalist approach to what comprises “modernity” and “modern” law, the history of its rationalisation, the development of formal jurisprudence in the West, and how these ideas were disseminated from the middle of 18th-century Europe to China, India, Japan, South Africa, Brazil, and other countries (see Chen, Reference Chen2016, p. 112).

At the latest since the imperial expansion in the 19th century, Western legal historians have enshrined—and still do—the idea of “modernity” and “modern law” inheriting Eurocentric perspectives on Chinese legal tradition. Within the distinct ideological as well as institutional premises that constituted the Western paradigm of modernity, its social and cultural programme developed against the imagination of the Orient as “the Other.” This imagination of the “Orient,” between fiction and reality, created a system of discourses and practices within a long historical process of Western interaction with the Orient especially, but not exclusively, in the era of Western imperialism (Said, Reference Said1978, pp. 3–4). Back then, the concept of modernity had developed against the backdrop of the social, economic, political, and cultural transformations in Europe during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The imagination of Chinese law as a barbaric, underdeveloped set of rules instrumentalised by a despotic ruler traces back even prior to the imperial expansionism in the late 19th century, to the early Sino-Western encounters in the 18th century. Events such as the famous Lady Hughes case in 1784 contributed to representations of Chinese law that would emphasise the great divergence between Chinese and Western legal cultures, imagining China as always lagging behind, ever constrained by Confucianist moralism,Footnote ²¹ sino-centric tradition, and institutional rigidity (Xu, Reference Xu and Pi2020, p. 105; see Ruskola, Reference Ruskola2013, p. 53).Footnote ²² This early “coloniality” of Western legal civilisation mission “[…] propagated notions of Western racial and civilizational superiority” (Salaymeh, Reference Salaymeh2022, pp. 117–118)Footnote ²³ that falsely ascribed to the imagination of an “arbitrary and [traditional] Chinese law” (Xu, Reference Xu2020, p. 105).Footnote ²⁴

Reviewing this Western tradition of narrating legal China provides reasonable ground to assume that each of our positions within an epistemic community (of practice) predisposes us to “Orientalise,” that is, to view China and its legal traditions through the lens of our own positionality.Footnote ²⁵ Although this may limit our observation spectrum at the first glance, we are able to adjust the conditioning concepts and framework of analysis we apply. Using a phrase of Haun Saussy, “[…] China, in the reader and elsewhere, is the reward of the right kind of reading” (Saussy, Reference Saussy1993, p. 151) and—in the case at hand—the “right kind” of reading includes social practices, whereby Chinese law, among other forms of normativity, across different historical stages was being produced.

What if we were more conscious of our blind spots and challenged our concept of law from its periphery? Then, we might be able to considerably broaden our field of observation. This broadening of observation scope eventually enabled us to move from merely “understanding” and “interpreting” to catching a glimpse at an unmediated, uninterpreted China. Given the temporal and intellectual demarcation between Occident and Orient, I suggest an “ethics of observation” for the study of Chinese law. Such ethics aim at a constant reflection of one's own positionality and “-isms” by understanding Chinese law as one—of many—tangible result(s) of a complex process of the production of knowledge of normativity. Therefore, to put it in Ruskola's words, “[…] the task is not, and cannot be, the ultimate elimination of all analytic apparatuses of European thought, such as Western ideas of law” (Ruskola, Reference Ruskola2013, p. 56).Footnote ²⁶ It is rather to reflect the diversity of genealogies, the entanglements, as well as the perils of Eurocentric and Orientalist reconstructions of global legal communication in our methods of examining Chinese legal history. However, such ethics of observation are not to present a new definition of law (see Ruskola, Reference Ruskola2013, p. 59). Rather, it is about shifting the perspective: from engaging with Chinese legal history based on a nation–state centred universalist idea of law and modernity to instead observing law as one result of an ongoing process of the production of a rich mosaic of normativity.

A nation–state centred approach to “law” for much of a century has also formed the methodological basis of European legal history. Therefore, I shortly revisit some of the key actors and methods of this discipline. The discipline of European legal history and tradition to practice legal history had been predominantly shaped by German scholarship, including names such as Emil Seckel, Erich Genzmer, Franz Wieacker, Helmut Coing, and Paul Koschaker. Within this epistemic community of practicing legal history, the disciplinary self-understanding has long clung to an identity-forming image of Europe that encompasses a legal culture clearly distinguishing itself from other continents and legal traditions.Footnote ²⁷ In particular, Wieacker's intellectual conception of an European-Occidental legal culture relies—similar to the historical assumptions underlying Max Weber's ensemble of ideal types—on three essential characteristics: legalism, personalism, and intellectualism (Duve, Reference Duve2012, p. 45). This created a robust narrative of unity, asserting that Europe has evolved into a bearer of categorically outstanding processes of rationalisation and juridification (see Wieacker, Reference Wieacker1967, p. 69). Another important visionary of a distinctively European legal history was Helmut Coing. In his works, Coing builds on the traditional narrative of the uniformity of the legal profession (Juristenstand) and scholarly tradition in Europe, while as a political person he actively contributed to the institutionalisation of European legal history discipline.Footnote ²⁸ In 1964, Coing became the first director of the newly founded “Max Planck Institute for European Legal History” (now Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory) in Frankfurt, Germany. As a result, Frankfurt then soon became one of the epicentres of historical studies on European private law (Duve, Reference Duve2012, p. 21). And it was one of his successors, Thomas Duve, who devoted himself to the “[…] critical review of the academic tradition of European Legal History, its conceptual foundations and its historical context” (Duve, Reference Duve2012, p. 1). In the past decades, Duve has contributed to a significant turn within the discipline towards a “Legal History of Europe in Global Historical Perspective” (Duve, Reference Duve2014, Reference Duve2016, Reference Duve2017, Reference Duve2018; Duve and Herzog, Reference Duve and Herzog2024). More recently, he has further developed this approach by “[…] [u]nderstanding legal history as the history of the production of knowledge of normativity through translation” (Duve, Reference Duve2022a, p. 8; see Duve, Reference Duve2022b). This paper works with all these methodological concepts and notions of what I believe marks a new tradition of practicing (European) legal history.

Another important European legal historian, whose “misunderstanding” of traditional Chinese law, showcasing it as a model case of “substantively irrational” law, became a prominent Orientalist narrative, is Max Weber. His views have deeply penetrated the Western imagination of Chinese law and Chinese legal tradition ever since.Footnote ²⁹ Albeit Max Weber is known as an important sociologist and theorist, and he was a legal historian by training (Dilcher, Reference Dilcher2007, p. 106).Footnote ³⁰ While according to Weber, formally rational law characterised by European civil law was “[…] the supremacy of general abstract rules,” he pictured Qing “collections of laws and regulations” as systematic compilations that were “[…] nothing but mechanical arrangements” (Weber, Reference Weber1954, p. 271, 354). In his work on The Religion of China, he discusses the absence of natural law and the formal logic of legal thought. According to Weber

Weber also characterised imperial China as a “‘Solomonic' Cadi-justice” (Weber, Reference Weber1951, p. 185). Against the backdrop of Chinese patrimonialism being solely guaranteed by “the sanctity of tradition” and the paucity of its administrative organisation, the development of a formal jurisprudence had been condemned to fail. Not only that, but

In Weber's eyes, China approximated the less advanced ideal type of legal system, namely that of a “substantively irrational” system (Marsh, Reference Marsh2000, p. 284). Besides this aspect, other shortcomings of Weber's analysis of Chinese law and “serious methodological flaws” of his analysis of Chinese society have been abundantly dealt with in Western as well as Chinese scholarship.Footnote ³¹ Among these critics is the work by Robert Marsh (Marsh, Reference Marsh2000), who importantly sheds light on Weber's numerous misunderstandings of the epistemic reality of social practices of law, regarding the vastness of officials' arbitrary discretion, and the historical reality of legal expertise within Qing bureaucracy. He showcases that in fact “[…] [Qing] China's legal system approximated Weber's substantively rational type more than the substantively irrational type” (Marsh, Reference Marsh2000, p. 281).

The discussion of Weberian theory has a well-established role in Chinese legal research. In 2002, Liang Zhiping 梁治平 (Liang, Reference Liang2002, p. 174) acknowledged the very differing Weber perceptions by sinologists and historians in the United States on the one hand, and those by Chinese scholars on the other hand:

Recently, Lai Junnan 赖骏楠 (Lai, Reference Lai2022) proposed a revised version of Weber's sociology of law facilitating a comparative legal–historical dialogue between Weber's theory and late imperial Chinese law. Lai, referencing Lin Duan 林端, points to the urgent task of the Chinese legal history discipline to shed more light on the Weberian imagination of Chinese law and his “[…] ambivalent endorsement of legal formalism” (Kennedy, Reference Kennedy2004, p. 1031), in order to deconstruct and detangle its embodied rationale of (Western) legal thought and the numerous misunderstandings of Qing law. Lin Duan criticises Weber for instrumentalising China as a mirror “[…] to highlight the uniqueness of Western legal culture, economy, politics, and culture” (Lin Duan quoted in You, Reference You2006, p. 158; see Lai, Reference Lai2023, p. 67).Footnote ³² Lin reminds Chinese scholars to deconstruct the Weberian genealogy of Chinese' society, including the law (as a social practice), and to promote their own understanding of Chinese culture and legal tradition, so that they would not mistakenly perceive Chinese culture through Weber's—that is, Western—eyes. Likewise, Lin demonstrates to Western legal scholars that there are alternatives to the Weberian imagination, to understand China's uniqueness and to constantly question our methodological presuppositions.

To summarise this section, the classical methodological toolset of European legal history advocating a nation–state centred approach to law has considerably contributed to the persistance of Orientalist narrations of non-European legal traditions such as China's and continues to limit historical perspectives on Chinese law.

2.3. Old and new methodological approaches to legal history in China

After revisiting these Orientalist and Eurocentric notions of the classical methodological toolset of Western and especially European legal history studies (discussing narratives of legal orientalist practice from Chinese perspective, see Jiang, Reference Jiang2020, p. 140), the following section attempts to shed some light on important pioneering works, trajectories as well as recent development trends within legal history discipline in China.

In 2002, Liang (Reference Liang2002, p. 156) outlined the development stages of modern Chinese legal history as a discipline in between history and law science in his benchmark article Perspectives on Legal History: Methods, Aims and Paradigms.Footnote ³³ In his analysis, Liang reviews the development of legal history studies in China since its early stage in late Qing dynasty and addresses the challenges the discipline will face in the 21st century.

Liang traces the origins of modern Chinese legal history back to Liang Qichao 梁启超, whom he considers the “the founder of modern Chinese legal history” (Liang, Reference Liang2002, p. 156).Footnote ³⁴ Albeit not what we today would consider a legal historian by training, Liang Qichao's role within the development of modern legal history studies in China cannot be underestimated. According to Liang (Reference Liang2002, p. 157), Liang Qichao significantly rewrote the history of Chinese law by practicing a combination of the then-mainstream legal positivist view of law and the theory of social evolution, criticising the stagnation of traditional Chinese law for more than 2,000 years and challenging traditional ways of historical narration (Liang, Reference Liang2002, p. 157).Footnote ³⁵ Liang Zhiping provides a very tangible picture of the transformative atmosphere that surrounded Liang Qichao when the latter crafted his new narratives on Chinese legal history: When Liang Qichao published his book On the Evolution, Gains, and Losses in the Establishment of Chinese Statutory Law (论中国成文法编制之沿革得失) in 1904, he had been experiencing significant social and intellectual upheavals of his time (Liang, Reference Liang2002, p. 157). In the same year, Yan Fu 严复 began publishing his translation of Montesquieu's The Spirit of Law, adding to his earlier translations of foundational Western texts such as Huxley's Evolution and Ethics, Smith's The Wealth of Nations, Spencer's The Study of Sociology, and Mill's On Liberty. These works introduced Chinese intellectuals to new paradigms of knowledge, witnessing a unprecedented shift in the political system and academia (Liang, Reference Liang2002, p. 157). This shift also altered the knowledge based on which the history of Chinese law and its tradition was practiced. Additionally, Liang Qichao utilised the knowledge bridge to Japan, making reference to Japanese legal treatises, such as Yorozu Oda's Administrative Law of the Qing State (jap. Shinkoku gyōseihō 清国行政法).

Approaching the Republican era, Liang especially remarks on Yang Honglie 杨鸿烈, a student of Liang Qichao, and his “monumental work” on The History of the Development of Chinese Law (中国法律发达史) (Yang, Reference Yang1930),Footnote ³⁶ as well as on the works of Chen Guyuan 陈顾远.Footnote ³⁷ According to Liang (Reference Liang2002, p. 159), the latter was the first to draw a distinction between the terms “law” (fa 法) and “institutions” (zhi 制). On a macro-historical perspective, this distinction contributed to the development of two separate schools of thought within legal history scholarship. One school that argues that the “institutions” or zhi regulates the “law” or fa and both of them being not mutually exclusive. This school considers the (Chinese) legal system to encompass laws, cultural practices, as well as criminal laws and civilising government decress. The other school of thought used “law” to regulate the system and argued that the legal system (法制) would at least be equivalent to criminal law (Liang, Reference Liang2002, p. 159).

Continuing his survey, Liang references Qu Tongzu's 瞿同祖 book Law and Society in Traditional China (中国法律与中国社会), published in 1947.Footnote ³⁸ According to Liang, the significance of Qu's works lies in their exploration of the history and the genesis of ancient law through the evolving relationship between law and society (Liang, Reference Liang2002, pp. 159–160). Contextualising this individual work in a broader historical observation, Liang regards the Republican era as a crucial period for the establishment of legal history as a discipline and the construction of historical narratives, building the foundation for subsequent research (Liang, Reference Liang2002, pp. 160–161). Liang's own monograph Harmony in the Quest for Natural Order: Studies in Traditional Chinese Legal Culture further develops Qu's “[…] attempt to integrate law into society and culture” in order to explore the spirit of ancient Chinese law (Liang, Reference Liang1997, Reference Liang2002, p. 164).

Since 1949, legal history in China then experienced not only geographical separation but also ideological transformation, triggering political and social movements in the 1950s. This caused a division in both geography and research traditions, which is why Liang considers the revolutionary events of the 1950s/1960s, the forced re-evaluation of values, and the role of law to have caused another paradigm shift (Liang, Reference Liang2002, p. 161). Approaching Reform era China, this new research paradigm continued to underpin the mainstream of contemporary legal history studies (Liang, Reference Liang2002, p. 161).Footnote ³⁹ In this regard, Liang's concept of a paradigm, depicting methodological as well as ideological elements, also approximates changes in the way knowledge of normativity was produced in contemporary China (Liang, Reference Liang2002, p. 155). This is also where the implementation of the concept of “historical regimes of normativity” (Duve, Reference Duve2022b) becomes an important factor, as it provides a useful framework to explain new arrangements of discourses, norms, and practices when the knowledge to create the existing regime was being altered. Such a shift in the regime of normativity—or, as Liang describes it, a paradigm shift—has, in the case of modern and contemporary China, been significantly driven by economical, political, and ideological transformations.

Two decades after the publication of Liang Zhiping's article, Gao Yangguang 高仰光 highlighted a significant gap in the study of legal history in China. Specifically, Gao's recent article addresses the lack of an epistemological analysis of its knowledge system and ability to raise questions relevant to other sub-disciplines within legal science (Gao, Reference Gao2024, p. 746).Footnote ⁴⁰ Gao attributes this primarily to the fact that legal history had yet to independently explore the critical question of the “dichotomy between facts and norms.” In relation to Liang Zhiping's review of 20th-century Chinese legal history, Gao (Reference Gao2024, p. 762) offers a rather urgent conclusion whereto China's legal history as an independent legal discipline was in strong need of epistemological self-awareness, intellectual curiosity and vitality, as well as updated knowledge. An enhanced legal-historical self-awareness to this end also reflects a responsibility of Chinese legal history discipline to contibute to the development of “[. . .] the practice of Socialist rule of law,” taking the traditional Chinese legal culture more “seriously” and connecting it to contemporary legal knowledge (Zhang and Sun, Reference Zhang and Sun2024, p. 38).

3.1. History of the production of knowledge of normativity through cultural translation

Given the shortcomings of analysing Chinese legal history from a merely norm-centred basis, this paper introduces a knowledge-historical approach to observe the evolution of modern and contemporary Chinese law. This approach is based on a practice of legal history as the “history of the translation of knowledge of normativity” (Duve, Reference Duve2022a) and allows (legal) historians to sensitise themselves to the wide range of knowledge types that actors produce through an ongoing process of cultural translation. Duve's concept is deeply informed by translation, cultural, knowledge, and sociological studies, and this interdisciplinary trajctories naturally facilitate a scholarly dialogue across different areas of study and over different time periods. It enables researchers working on different epistemic communities (e.g., on early modern Iberian worlds, early modern Rio de Janeiro, the global south or modern China) and their practices to share a methodological language through which they can mutually understand legal-historical continuances and changes as well as similarities and differences in a distinctly global perspective (see Bragagnolo, Reference Bragagnolo2024; Dias Paes, Reference Dias Paes2024, pp. 80–94; Duve and Danwerth, Reference Duve and Danwerth2020; Li, Reference Li2021; Marques Machado, Reference Marques Machado2023). These different local case studies all share an interest to explore how knowledge of normativity with regard to a particular field of action was produced through practices of cultural translation. And they all share the basic assumption that “law” can be characterised “[…] as the outcome of a complex communicative process of producing meaning and assigning normativity” (Duve, Reference Duve2022a, p. 5). While “cultural translation” can include lingual translations from one language into another, its conceptual meaning refers to a process of locally contextualising existing knowledge and assigning it new meanings, thereby creating new knowledge (Duve, Reference Duve2022a, pp. 7–8). Following this “performative” understanding of law and how it is created, this concept attempts to overcome the shortcoming of laws' traditional construction as a system of norms where the legal-historical analysis is limited to legal dogmatics (Duve, Reference Duve2022a, p. 5). Instead, the focus is on the actors and the processes of the production of normative knowledge and its cultural translation they engage in. While analysing the apparatus of knowledge production (“what” kind of knowledge of normativity is produced), we also need to look at the “operating system” (“how” it is produced) that enables this production process (Duve, Reference Duve2021, p. 58). This “knowledge of the production of normativity” (Normativitätserzeugungswissen) (hereafter “production-knowledge”) includes conventions and other rules and they may change when economic, political, ideological shifts, or other circumstances like change in material conditions occur (Duve, Reference Duve2021, p. 58).

What comprises “knowledge” (zhishi 知识; Wissen) has been the object of different approaches within knowledge studies and beyond. Examples are the sociological studies by Foucault (Reference Foucault1981, Reference Foucault1988) as well as by Berger and Luckmann (Reference Berger and Luckmann1969). Generally, the observation target of Western knowledge studies is the social construction of knowledge and “knowledge societies” as well as the “historical studies of knowledge” continuing the research tradition of the history of science studies.Footnote ⁴¹ Amid the vast and multifaceted debate about what can be conceived as “knowledge,”Footnote ⁴² its theoretical framework, and definition, I have followed Thomas Duve in understanding “knowledge of normativity” “[…] as the total set of propositions that the members of an epistemic community explicitly or de facto accept or that a sufficient number of texts posit” (Duve, Reference Duve2022a, p. 3). When it comes to the qualification of knowledge as “normative”—similar to Duve—I draw on Christoph Möller's concept of social norms and conceptual framework to analyse them as “positively marked possibilities” (Möllers, Reference Möllers2020, p. xii).Footnote ⁴³

In 2022, Zhang Nongji published her monograph Legal Scholars and Scholarship in the People's Republic of China: The First Generation, 1949–1992. In her book, Zhang demonstrates the intellectual underpinnings of contemporary Chinese legal history by drawing attention to the stories of the pioneering knowledge actors who conceptualised and established today's disciplines of legal studies and thereby contributed to the becoming of “modern” Chinese law.Footnote ⁴⁴ This is a recognisable shift in the object of the study of Chinese legal history: from the legal content to its creator. While there have been case studies on knowledge actors with regard to the development of late imperial law including government officials, magistrates, and private expertise, this research focuses on legal scholars as “the” important group of knowledge actors in Chinese legal history. Their individual contributions have shaped Chinese history of legal thought, culture, and legislation since the late Qing dynasty. However, Chinese legal actors and their knowledge contributions remain rather invisible to Western academia to this day. This article aims to contribute to a broader knowledge history of Chinese law by focusing on some of the (pioneering) intellectual faces who contributed to legal education, legislation, and scientification of administrative law.

3.2. Knowledge of normativity in the case of Chinese administrative law science

Why is this approach of a history of the cultural translation of knowledge of normativity useful in the case of Chinese administrative law science history? What could be the added value compared to narrating a history of legal dogmatics (法教义学) using traditional methods of norm-centred analysis? The answer to this question is manifold. Firstly, by departing from the traditional methodology of Western legal history, this approach shifts the focus from the analysis of legal documents (legal knowledge) to a variety of knowledge sources that are utilised in the process of producing normativity for a specific field of action throughout the development of modern Chinese legal thought and system. The focus on normative knowledge allows for a more China-centred and less eurocentric analysis of the history of xingzheng fa 行政法 and other sources of normativity in China. Thereby, a knowledge-historical approach may enable a methodological distance to the Western concept of law and its strong attachment to Eurocentric and Orientalist discourses on (legal) modernisation in China.Footnote ⁴⁵ Further, it opens our perspective for the knowledge of local circumstances, including local discourses, norms, rules, practices, and institutions with regard to a specific field of action, such as customs (习惯), rituals (礼), community compacts (乡约), and alternative non-state dispute resolution mechanisms (including ancient petitioning, an apology/explanation (说法), letters and visits (信访). This also entails knowledge about governance practices, rules, power structures, and the genealogy of political-ideological thought systems. The latter inter alia encompasses the knowledge produced by the philosophical schools of Confucianism, Legalism, and Taoism.Footnote ⁴⁶ Yet, another source of knowledge is the contemporary ideological concept of Sino-Marxism forming the theoretical guidance of the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese peoples, which includes “[…] the guidance of Marxism–Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, the important thought of Three Represents, the Scientific Outlook on Development, and Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics in a New Era.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Against this backdrop, Sino-Marxism as an ideological belief system is an important resource of knowledge employed in the processes of production of normativity. Therefore, along with Party doctrine, documents and regulations, they form knowledge of normativity and likewise normative resources.

Secondly, this approach redefines the subject matter of Chinese legal history. Through a knowledge-historical lens, we may observe law as (only) one of many forms of normativity that are produced within an ongoing social and communicative process among knowledge actors (see Duve, Reference Duve2022a, p. 2).

Lastly, besides the knowledge production in the narrow sense, e.g., translating foreign legal texts or analysing the experience of local courts in handling cases, the scope of observation also includes practices to authorise, de-authorise, and circulate (new) knowledge. The analysis of all these different “layers” of the knowledge production process comes along with a radical focus on knowledge actors, their roles, contribution, and own narratives of processes observed (see Duve, Reference Duve2022a, p. 8).Footnote ⁴⁸ To provide some examples, this may include the analysis of the roles of Ming officials in the Ministry of Justice, censor officials, and circuit inspectors in producing and disseminating legal knowledge, particularly concerning the commentary on the Great Ming Code.Footnote ⁴⁹ It may also include studies on the role of the Qing legal reformers such as Shen Jiaben 沈家本 and Wu Tingfang 伍廷芳 in the processes of normative knowledge production during the late Qing legal reforms.Footnote ⁵⁰ Case studies of local Yamen staff in the Qing dynasty and their highly technical local knowledge, as seen in the study conducted by Reed (Reference Reed2000), would likewise contribute to the mosaic of the knowledge-history of Chinese law. Similarly, the knowledge production by political elites in the 20th century would yet add another aspect.

The inclusive and interdisciplinary concept of knowledge of normativity is able to capture the unique combination of knowledge types important to the formation and genealogy of Chinese law and legal science. For my study of the history of administrative law science, there are three types of knowledge that are especially relevant to my larger research project: (i) socio-political knowledge of normativity, (ii) translated knowledge of normativity, and (iii) traditional knowledge of normativity.

My research observes “socio-political knowledge of normativity” across different historical stages of development building upon the concept of “contextual knowledge” by Wolfgang Hoffmann-Riem. This includes knowledge on the practical and political function of codified laws and other forms of legal regulation (Hoffmann-Riem, Reference Hoffmann-Riem2016, pp. 307–308).Footnote ⁵¹ In the case of modern legal China, such “political function” can be observed, inter alia (i) in the context of the drafting of civil and criminal law codes in the late Qing dynasty to free the empire from the burden of extraterritoriality,Footnote ⁵² (ii) within the turn to Soviet law as a model law in the late Republican/early PRC times and again—yet, less dominant—in 1980s China, (iii) and alongside the large-scale legislation to facilitate the Reform and Opening-Up policy under Deng Xiaoping starting in 1978. Furthermore, the focus on political knowledge importantly includes ideological contexts, like for instance the doctrine of Party leadership and the socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics.Footnote ⁵³ However, besides the political knowledge of normativity that formed a main driver especially during the administrative legislation activities conducted by legal scholars in 1980s China, there is also a constant cultural–philosophical component within the knowledge production process that requires special consideration. This cultural–philosophical component includes, e.g., the changing influence of different philosophical schools (such as Confucianism, Legalism, Taoism, and Neo-Confucianism) and their significance in the different legal reforming periods since the Reform Edict issued by Empress Dowager Cixi in 1901. Examples are the li-fa-debates during the formulation of criminal and civil law codes in 1911/1912 (Zhang, Reference Zhang2019, p. 234), and the introduction of the new core principle “People suing government officials” (min gao guan 民告官) with the promulgation of the Administrative Litigation Law (中华人民共和国行政诉讼法) (hereinafter “ALL”) (1989).Footnote ⁵⁴ In both cases, social norms and traditional social hierarchies in the Confucian sense as well as their attached legal, ethical, and philosophical implications formed important points of academic and public discussion.Footnote ⁵⁵ In the case of “min gao guan,” the novel character behind the revolutionary formula can only be grasped from within the feeling of the Chinese people at that time. The word “official” (官) contains a historically practiced notion of superiority and inequality in relation to the general “people” (民). Therefore, “people suing (government) officials” naturally carries the meaning of correcting this traditional inequality created by societal class structure of imperial China's system of positions and titles. In legal practice, Cai Xiaoxue 蔡小雪, former presiding judge of the Administrative Tribunal of the Supreme People's Court (hereafter “SPC”), recalls that the principle “(ordinary) people suing (government) officials” stood

Another key form of knowledge that highlights the distinctiveness of Chinese legal scholars' knowledge production is “translated knowledge of normativity.” Translated knowledge of normativity (in a narrow sense) particularly emphasises the observation of the physical travelling of (i) Japanese and (ii) Western normative knowledge over Japan to China. This type of knowledge, albeit being derived from outside Chinese local knowledge production processes, has a generative and original character due to the cultural embeddedness of the translator and his work. Since the late Qing government actively supported Chinese scholars in their studies of foreign models of governance and legal systems in Japan, the first systematic cultural translation of Western legal thinking was mediated through Japanese legal academia (He, Reference He2007, p. 42). These Chinese students attended special legal training in Japan (e.g., at Hosei University, Tokyo) and then disseminated their new knowledge by translating Japanese textbooks and lecture notes into Chinese.Footnote ⁵⁶ The first local investigation that proposes a Chinese understanding of administrative law was written by Xia Tonghe 夏同龢, introducing xingzheng fa 行政法 as a legal (academic) concept for the first time in his book Administrative Law published in 1905.Footnote ⁵⁷ While early Republican works since the 1920s started to more intensively discuss local Chinese questions of administrative law, such as the inclusion of political doctrines (He, Reference He2007, p. 43), some works like those of Zhong Gengyan 钟庚言 and Bai Pengfei 白鹏飞 were reviewed rather critically and labelled as “transplants of Japanese administrative law studies” (Luo and Sun, Reference Luo and Sun2001, p. 94). In early Republican China, scholars continued to translate predominantly Japanese as well as German and French works on administrative law representing the system of civil law traditions. The 1920s then marked a significant period in the science history of Chinese administrative law as it observed the beginning of a more rigorous academic treatment of administrative law as a specialised field within Chinese legal studies (Wang, Reference Wang2023a, p. 71; Historical facts, 2024) as well as its “Sinicization” (Wang, Reference Wang2023a, p. 72). During the 1930s, when Soviet influence in China grew, Republican scholars began (culturally) translating and introducing Soviet administrative law knowledge (Wang, Reference Wang2023a, p. 77). This process came to its climax in 1949, when the Guomingdang regime was replaced by “[…] a Soviet-inspired system of legal theory and knowledge,” introducing a period during which Soviet administrative law exerted significant influence (Song and Fan, Reference Song and Fan2024, p. 203). After the political turmoil of the 1960s—a period often described as one of “lawlessness” (无法无天)—and the implementation of the transformative Reform and Opening-Up policy, the translated knowledge of Soviet administrative law was not considered a solid basis for the re-establishment of legal education and research in China. It also did not help to pave China's new path towards a new socialist legal order because it very much relied on the management theory of administrative law. Instead, as China was transitioning from planned to market economy, there was a practical need to constrain discretionary power of administrative bodies. Consequently, English, French, German, Japanese, Taiwanese,Footnote ⁵⁸ and US–American administrative law were once again systemically studied and (culturally) translated to create a body of knowledge on general administrative law theory and litigation law, which would inform administrative legislation from 1986 onwards (Wang, Reference Wang2023a, pp. 105–120).Footnote ⁵⁹ One example was the discussion of the draft of an “Administrative Legal Order for Württemberg (Verwaltungsrechtsordnung für Württemberg)” (1931), one of the former German states, which was considered an outstanding attempt to draft a complete administrative law code.

Yet, another important knowledge type is “traditional knowledge of normativity.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The World Intellectual Property Organization defines “traditional knowledge” as knowledge that is “[…] developed, sustained and passed on from generation to generation within a community, often forming part of its cultural or spiritual identity” (WIPO, no date). In the case of Chinese administrative litigation, this relates in particular to traditional mechanisms of dispute resolution. These include, for instance, the petition system and local practices of mediation including the practice of shuofa (说法)—to ask for an explanation without aiming at penalty. While during the drafting process the legal scholars and legislators opted against the general possibility of mediation within court-based administrative litigation, extra-legal mechanisms such as shuofa were not included therein. Instead, the traditional petitioning system of “letters and visits” (信访) continues to be practiced until today.

This brief overview of the various forms of knowledge of normativity explored in my research highlights the necessity for a historical analysis of Chinese law that moves beyond the observation of state-centred norm production. Instead, such analysis must explore the divers forms of normativity, which have emerged across different socio-political contexts and periods in Chinese history.

5.1. Early footprints of Chinese administrative law science

The intellectual foundations of “modern” Chinese administrative law trace back to the end of Qing dynasty.Footnote ⁶⁶ There, the establishment of higher education in administrative law was a conditio sine qua non for the emergence of a Chinese administrative law system and its scholarship in the Republican era (Wang, Reference Wang2023a, p. 13). This was the case for both modernisation movements of the late Qing dynasty and again after the historical turning point of Reform and Opening-Up—both being periods of intense transformation. The (re-)establishment of higher legal education in administrative law during these pivotal times served as crucial catalyst for knowledge production with regard to administrative law. In the following section, I introduce important actors, specific knowledge types, knowledge production patterns, and resources prominent within the education and study of administrative law at the end of Qing dynasty.

5.2. From paradigm to paralysis: The Sovietisation and intellectual downturn in Chinese administrative law education since the 1950s

In the first decade of the PRC, the relationship between the Chinese state and the law experienced a paradigmatic shift and highly penetrated legal education and research, including the area of administrative law. This shift is strongly connected with the abolishment of the Guomingdang's “Complete Book of Six Laws” (六法全书) and the primacy of new Party policies and regulations to administer justice. The following reform of legal education conducted in the 1950s was impacted by two significant developments: firstly, the large-scale judicial reform movement (1952–1953), which replaced the former judiciary, its ideologies and notions of justice; and secondly, the restructuring of academic institutions, which reduced the number of higher education institutions from 211 to 182, merged 53 political and legal departments into four remaining schools of politics and law, and transformed private universities into public institutions (Wang, Reference Wang2023a, p. 75). This is the institutional background against which legal education on administrative law experienced its most important interplay with Soviet administrative law.

The Sovietisation of legal education in 1950s China experienced omnipresence while Chinese research on administrative law increasingly came to a “standstill” (Wang, Reference Wang2023a, p. 74). When Soviet administrative law reached its peak of influence in the mid-1950s, approximately 165 textbooks were translated from Russian to Chinese. The State Law Department at Renmin University published four notable works: (i) Soviet Administrative Law—General Part (1953) and (ii) Soviet Administrative Law—Specific Part (1955), both by the Russian jurist S. S. StudenikinFootnote ⁸¹ , who also taught “Soviet Administrative Law” at Renmin University of China and the Beijing College of Political Science and Law (He, Reference He2007, p. 45, footnote 21); (iii) V. A. Vlasov's Outline of Soviet Administrative Law (1954); and (iv) Selected Translations of Essays on Soviet Administrative Law: Volume One (1957) (Ying, Reference Ying2009, p. 63). Although some Chinese scholars studied in the Soviet Union, none of them specialised in Soviet administrative law. Therefore, leading Soviet scholars like S. S. Studenikin were invited by Renmin University of China and other Chinese institutions to give lectures on administrative law. Besides the “Reference Materials on Administrative Law of the People's Republic of China (General Provisions)” (1956)Footnote ⁸² edited by the State Law Department of the Renmin University of China, no other Chinese textbook on administrative law was published during this period (Ying, Reference Ying2009, p. 63). In 1955, Zhang Huanguang 张焕光Footnote ⁸³ was the first graduate from the Law Department of the Renmin University of China, receiving his master degree in administrative law in New China (Wang, Reference Wang2023a, p. 76). This was remarkable since there had not been any graduate schools at Chinese universities offering degree programmes (Wang, Reference Wang2023a, pp. 76–77).Footnote ⁸⁴ The translation of Soviet administrative law textbooks, the active involvement of Soviet jurists in teaching at Renmin University of China and other Chinese universities, and the graduation of students majoring administrative law—all facilitated by Renmin University of China—highlight its crucial role in the Sovietisation of Chinese administrative law and education. These efforts established a significant path dependency in the overall construction of a Chinese knowledge system specifically related to administrative law and the evolution of administrative law as a legal science.

Beginning with the anti-rightist campaign and “the 1957 break between China and Soviet Union” (Tay, Reference Tay1987, p. 571), the field of administrative legal scholarship and education experienced a sudden downturn, culminating in a complete halt and destruction of legal education due to subsequent political upheavals. Advocating legality and the rule of law became acts of resistance against the Party (Ying, Reference Ying2009, p. 63). This affected the careers of administrative law scholars such as Fan Yang, who shifted to studying Hegel's Philosophy of Law, and Wang Mingyang, who, after studying French administrative law in Paris, ended teaching upon his return to China (Ying, Reference Ying2009, p. 63).

5.3. The recovery of legal education, new administrative legislation, and the re-birth of administrative law science

More than two decades later, with the revival of administrative law education, scholars found themselves in a transformed academic environment, characterised by an altered Party–state ideology as the country opened again to the Western world. Although the research and translation of Soviet law textbooks continued into the 1980s, their influence waned as their concepts were critically reassessed and replaced. The strong managerialist character of Soviet administrative law no longer aligned with the evolving social, economic, and political conditions of Deng era China (Ying, Reference Ying2009, p. 63).

When the Cultural Revolution reached its end and the proletarian morality had to give way to a rule of law with Chinese characteristics, administrative law research could eventually recover, and an administrative law discipline gradually re-emerged. Liu Hainan's and Chang Zhaoru's call for the “Improvement and Strict Implementation of Administrative Law,” first published in the People's Daily in 1979, reminds of this recovery process (Liu and Chang, Reference Liu and Chang1979). Given the “long-term stagnation” of administrative law research and education during the Cultural Revolution, the need for new knowledge on administrative law and its theory was obvious (Ma and Kong, Reference Ma and Kong2018, p. 500).

Entering Deng era China, a new generation of scholars had taken the lead to re-establish administrative law science.Footnote ⁸⁵ Among them were Wang Mincan, Ying Songnian 应松年, Zhu Weijiu 朱维究, Jiang Ming'an 姜明安, and Luo Haocai 罗豪才. Later Ma Huaide 马怀德, Yuan Shuhong 袁曙宏, Feng Jun 冯军, and Zhang Shangshan 张尚赡, among other scholars, continued this new path of administrative law science. Inside and outside of their individual institutions, these scholars contributed to the rehabilitation of legal education in the area of administrative law studies,Footnote ⁸⁶ including domestic research on administrative law as well as comparative law perspectives on foreign administrative legal systems. Between 1977 and 1979, the “five universities and four law schools” (五院四系) gradually restarted activities and began to teach specialised courses on administrative law again.Footnote ⁸⁷ Since 1982, compulsory courses were then offered at Chinese universities for the major law, including Peking University, Beijing College of Political Science and Law, Southwest University of Political Science and Law, Northwest University of Political Science and Law, Anhui University, and Hubei University of Finance and Economics. This was key to the successful rebirth of legal studies on Chinese administrative law.Footnote ⁸⁸ In 1983, Beijing College of Political Science and Law started a master's degree in administrative law for postgraduate students, conducted inter alia by Ying Songnian, and soon became the new epicentre of the production of normative knowledge (Ying and He, Reference Ying and He2015, p. 63). This is for example emphasised by its extracurricular teaching, including an “Administrative Law Research Class” (行政法研究班) in 1984. During this course, Roger De Meyer, back then Professor Emeritus of administrative law at Ghent University, was invited to lecture on Belgian administrative law and Wang Mingyang instructed comparative administrative law.Footnote ⁸⁹ This event was significant as it marked the first instance in over 30 years that a Western administrative law scholar spoke on a Chinese podium (He, Reference He2007, p. 46). It also signalled a “re-exposure to Western administrative law” (He, Reference He2007, p. 46). From this observation, we can infer a significant paradigm shift in the knowledge production processes of the early 1980s: the re-authorisation of normative knowledge from Western countries coupled with the gradual de-authorisation of Soviet knowledge on administrative law.

From March until July 1985, the Beijing College of Political Science and Law launched an “Administrative Law Training Course for Teachers” (行政法师资进修班) to train a new generation of law school professors. The over 40 participants of this teacher-training course included the talents of today's scholarship, such as Meng Hongzhi 孟鸿志, Shen Kaiju 沈开举, Xing Hongfei 邢鸿飞, Yang Haikun 杨海坤, Yang Xiaojun 杨小军, and Ye Bifeng 叶必丰. Ying Songnian, Zhu Weijiu and Wang Mingyang were mainly in charge of the offered courses (Ying and He, Reference Ying and He2015, pp. 66–67). Foreign scholars like Bernard Schwartz—guest lecturing on administrative law in 1987 at four Chinese law schools—likewise witnessed the leading efforts of Beijing College of Political Science and Law (today's CUPL) in acquiring knowledge in the area of administrative law.Footnote ⁹⁰

The process of recovery of legal education on administrative law was supported by a “threefold materiality” of newly disseminated normative knowledge:Footnote ⁹¹ (i) new teaching materials and textbooks, (ii) translations of foreign textbooks and treatise on administrative law, and (iii) comparative legal scholarship in China.

In the early 1980s, important teaching material included the Outline of Administrative Law (行政法概要) and Selected Reference Materials for Teaching the Outline of Administrative Law (行政法概要教学参考资料选编), collected by Zhu Weijiu and Fang Yan, both published by the Department of State Law at the CUPL in 1982. The reference materials encompassed 308 pages including (i) texts of legal documents, such as promulgated laws, resolutions of the Standing Committee, organisational regulations of the People's Congresses and People's Committees newspaper, resolutions of the Standing Committee, State Council's directives and regulations, and (provisional) measures of different ministries; (ii) reports from the People's Daily newspaper on political decisions and developments; and (iii) political speeches and related discussion including those by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin as well as Mao Zedong. The pronounced focus on political–ideological directives and regulations aimed at strengthening the Chinese Communist Party in the early 1980s underscores two key points: the scarcity of theoretical knowledge on administrative law appropriate for training a new generation of scholars in higher education, and the deep entanglement of knowledge production within the political and economic transformation processes of the Chinese state during this period. Also, in 1982, the East–South College of Political Science and Law published two volumes of Administrative Law Teaching Reference Material (行政法教学参考资料).

The personal lecture note collection Administrative Law Studies (行政法学) by Jiang Ming'an (1985) included six chapters: (i) introduction, (ii) state administrative organs, (iii) national staff members, (iv) administrative activity, (v) supervision of the administrative legal system, and (vi) administrative litigation.Footnote ⁹² Newly compiled textbooks from the Reform-period included Outline of Administrative Law (行政法概要) and Selected Administrative Law Materials (行政法资料选编) edited both by Wang Mincan (1984),Footnote ⁹³ General Theory of Administrative Law (行政法学总论) edited by Ying Songnian, and Zhu Weijiu (1985), Administrative Law (行政法) edited by Ying Songnian (1986), Contemporary Chinese Administrative Law (当代中国行政法) (1988) edited by Wang Liansi 王连思, Chinese Administrative Law Coursebook (中国行政法教程) (1988) edited by Pi Chunxie, and later Jiang Ming'an's book Administrative Law and Administrative Litigation (行政法与行政诉讼法)(1990).Footnote ⁹⁴ With the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, the focus shifted to theoretical works on administrative law doctrine, including works such as Basic Knowledge of Administrative Law (行政法基本知识), edited by Zhang Huanguang 张焕光, Liu Shuguang 刘曙光, and Su Shangzhi 苏尚智 (1986), and Administrative Law Theory (行政法论) edited by Luo Haocai (1988) (Wang, Reference Wang2023a, pp. 98–99).

Secondly, translations from the Republican era, along with newly conducted translations of foreign administrative law systems, became important sources for both legal education and legislation. This included American, British, French, German, Japanese, Taiwanese and Soviet textbooks on administrative law. Yet, Late-Qing and Republican era translations of Japanese administrative law textbooks, including the works by Minobe Tatsukichi's Administrative Law Summary (行政法撮要) and Japanese Administrative Law Summary (second volume) (日本行政法撮要(下卷)), seem to have formed the most enduring knowledge sources among translative works (Wang, Reference Wang2023b, 94). While there was a short renaissance of translations of Soviet administrative law (studying works like Soviet Administrative Law by Manokhin (Reference Manokhin1983)),Footnote ⁹⁵ British, French, German, Japanese, and US–American textbooks became a new focus of published translations at the latest since the second half of the 1980s (Wang, Reference Wang2023b, pp. 94–95). Additionally, scholars such as the members of the Administrative Legislation Research Group (行政立法研究组), which is introduced in the next section, compiled translations of specific foreign laws and regulations (Administrative Legislation Research Group, 1994). Apart from translations, the Republican domestic scholarship on administrative law, including works of Fang Yang and Bai Pengfei, formed a crucial starting point for 1980s scholars like Ying Songnian (He and Ying, 2015, p. 33; Wang, Reference Wang2023b, p. 95).

Lastly, comparative analysis, such as Wang Mingyang's administrative law “trilogy” or Gong Xiangrui's Comparative Constitutional Law and Administrative Law (比较宪法与行政法) (Reference Gong1985), contributed to the “re-authorisation” of Western administrative law knowledge.

5.4. Administrative legislation in 1980s China and the role of administrative law scholars