The rule of law, an abstract concept heavily debated among legal scholars and social scientists, has in the past few decades acquired a nearly universal appeal, as democracies, autocracies, and oligarchies all claim to uphold it. Repeatedly, Xi and the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have pledged to build a “rule-of-law country.” But when the ruling elites of a one-party authoritarian state allege commitment to the rule of law, what do they really mean? How is it different from the Western concepts of the rule of law, especially the “thick” version of it that has been closely tied to liberal democratic values? What are the key features of the “rule of law with Chinese characteristics”? And how will it impact the international legal order? Applying a transnational legal ordering framework, this chapter attempts some answers. It traces the development of the Chinese legal system and the evolving rule-of-law debates in China and then explores how China might impact the international legal order.

This chapter introduces comparative lawyers to the field known as law and development, which in turn examines the uses of law for developmental objectives. The chapter attempts to relate the two fields and indicate the relevance of each to the other. In the course of doing this we also introduce a general theory of law and development that can be used as a bridge between the two. We submit that law and development is itself developing in ways that involve new ideas and the processing of varied experiences; these in themselves are preoccupations of comparative law too.

Chapter 1 unpacks the traditional framework that shapes how scholars and policymakers think of corporate governance and its role in financial development and market growth. It reviews the main strands of literature that have nourished legal scholarship in the field of economic development law and development studies and the new institutional economics tradition. It describes how these strands connect with the main theories underlying scholarship on corporate governance and financial market development and explains that the literature highlight the importance of investor protection for the growth and development of markets.

Part II establishes the alternative law and political economy framework by unpacking the dynamics between politics and law in the process of China’s market reforms. It starts with describing the relationship between law and politics in constructing one of the primary mechanisms of macro control in China – China’s socio-economic development blueprint, the “Five-Year Plan.”

It then moves to a chapter-by-chapter analysis of the evolving roles of law during China’s market reforms, outlining a three-stage shift in the allocation of market governance authorities within the Party-state system through legal evidence.

Throughout this part of the book, the author examines the legal configurations of political-power dynamics through a systematic investigation of the vast body of market-related primary and secondary sources of law and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) documents that have been promulgated in China since the early reforms until the present day. This Part reflects how two functions of law – economic and political – have developed side by side, each supporting the other.

Chapter 2 explains that the traditional framework through which economic development is analyzed creates a puzzle when applied to the Chinese market. Regarding clearly defined, strong, and predictable rights and reliable legal institutions as preconditions for financial market development does not align with the ways in which China’s financial market evolved. The chapter highlights the resulting marginalizing view of the role of law in China. It ponders the dissonance that was created between the common devaluing of Chinese law and the Party-state’s sophisticated use of law to govern markets. To resolve this dissonance, the chapter offers law & political economy as an alternative analytical framework through which to address China’s market development puzzle and the role of law within it.

The chapter also provides notes on methodology, including data collection and methods of analysis, as well as important caveats about the study.

Scholars have long regarded certain attributes of corporate governance, particularly legal institutions that protect investors, as engines for financial development, capital market expansion, and growth. Yet, the development of China’s market challenges many of the underlying assumptions in those theories and leaves its observers puzzled. Consequently, many have dismissed the role of law in China’s economic development. But they have neglected to consider the political functions of law and how they have bolstered the development of the Chinese market. Part I delineates the conceptual and analytical frameworks underpinning the book. Chapter 1 unpacks the traditional framework that shapes how scholars and policymakers think of corporate governance and its role in financial development and market growth. Chapter 2 offers law and political economy as an alternative analytical framework through which to address the puzzle and the role of law within it.

The Introduction provides a summary of the central arguments and outlines the chapters of the book.

This chapter presents the field of rule of law reform as the context for the study of expert ignorance. It argues that, for some rule of law experts, the rule of law is underdetermined in a radical way. Analysing the scholarly and practitioner literature on rule of law reform, it shows that this position is meaningfully widespread in the field. It contrasts this view with that prevailing in the literature on rule of law reform, which imagines that rule of law experts seek to derive their authority from their knowledge about how to do rule of law reform, leading to effects like the poor transplantation of laws and institutions. I also introduce some of the stylistic and methodological problems this question raises and point to my responses: fictionalised and plurivocal reflections on my rule of law reform work. This entails a particular form of authorial presence that reflects who I understand a rule of law reformer to be – someone who can tell enough of a story to bring the reader along while fragmenting, shifting, and making fragile the story, the author, and her authority.

This chapter grapples with the possibility that a historical account of rule of law reform might provide both context and insight into reformers’ own attempts to radically critique rule of law reform. I make two arguments. The first is methodological: reformers’ ignorance about the rule of law makes it impossible to conduct an authoritative historical sociology, genealogy, or historicised immanent critique of reformers. The second is historical: I offer a historical account of rule of law reform but frame it as a specific and standalone political intervention. I argue that a standalone profession of ignorant rule of law reformers emerged in the late 1990s or early 2000s, when development ideas about the form and function of institutions shifted from a neoliberal understanding of institutions as a means of giving form to the sublime complexity of the world, to being a complex sublime themselves.

This chapter offers a novel theoretical and methodological apparatus to reinterpret rule of law reform. I draw on aesthetic theory to reimagine rule of law reform as an aesthetic practice, in which efforts to build the sublime ‘rule of law’ produce both shadows of the rule of law and the shadowy figure of the rule of law reformer. I go on to argue that this aesthetic remains irreducibly embodied in the body of the reformer and that rule of law reform is, thus, in a very real sense, performance. I turn to performance studies, as well as Stanislavski’s system of training actors, to analyse these performances, and discuss precisely how they complement the methods in the previous chapter. I then put this new method into practice, rewriting my cases as dramatic performances. In doing so, I show how expert ignorance might productively be understood through the dramatic structure of ignorant experts’ action.

This chapter focuses on efforts to socially organise and limit expert ignorance. It focuses on “problem-driven iterative adaptation”, a contemporary approach to rule of law reform, to show how experts might try to create their own social organisations (such as a network or social movement) to restrict legitimate types of ignorance and implementation work. This has two sets of effects. First, it shapes and limits the provisional forms of the rule of law that rule of law reforms produce. Second, it places these performances in relation to the broader expert apparatus of development – for example, enabling them to be mainstreamed into specific development projects. This, I suggest, could be depoliticising: rule of law performances might function as a repository for contentious political and legal issues that projects raise, enabling the rest of the project to continue without much fuss.

This chapter shows expert ignorance in action. I focus on three common methods: organisational sociologies, Foucauldian discourse analysis, and ethnographies of practices. I develop a case study of a fictionalised agricultural reform project in sub-Saharan Africa, in which I advised on the project’s rule of law component. I analyse the project using these three different methods to show their contributions and limitations to understanding expert ignorance. I argue that all three approaches have some methodological assumption that experts claim epistemic or practical authority to give form and content to the rule of law. The politics of a rule of law reform project is embedded in the form and substance of accounts of that project; this assumption thus inhibits these accounts from showing how expert ignorance works in practice. I then introduce what they cannot adequately capture – ‘ignorance work’ and its operations.

Returning to the cases in the previous chapters, this chapter shows that reformers conduct ‘ignorance work’, which destabilises the structures of space, time, and identity that might otherwise encase a rule of law reform. The chapter goes on to show that ignorance work has patterned relationships to ‘implementation work’. For example, experts might base a project on the claim that the very concept of the rule of law is incapable of being known or that the rule of law is too empirically complex to be understood, even while trying to develop global indicators about measuring the rule of law. Turning to their effects, the chapter argues that these patterns are ways by which a rule of law expert produces provisional forms of law and politics in the Global South – for example, through well-funded and continuing pilot projects to implement indicators in various contexts under a rubric of transparency. At the same time, key questions about those forms are repeatedly raised and never resolved – for example, the location of the law/politics divide.

Although law was placed at the centre of the development process in the Law and Development movement launched in the 1960s, there was limited understanding at the time of the factors necessary for borrowed laws to succeed in the adopting country. This chapter investigates the theoretical links between adoption and implementation of borrowed competition laws and integrates strands from comparative law, literature on policy diffusion and transfer, and new institutional economics to develop a framework for examining competition law transplants as they proceed along the deliberation–adoption–implementation continuum. This chapter argues that a borrowed law may be considered successful if it is understood, utilised, and applied in the borrowing country and continues to grow in and become a part of its pre-existing legal system. It further argues that this is only possible if the borrowed law is compatible with the context of the adopting country and enjoys a degree of legitimacy in it.