When people ask me about law in China they are mostly skeptical that it means much at all. Perfectly understandable since the word on the street here is that intellectual property theft is rampant, and violations of rights widespread - as in the compulsory Sinfication camps in the Uyghu Muslim autonomous region of Xinjiang.
But the Chinese courts have in the past 40 years been increasingly professionalized and law codified as one hundred fifty law schools educated two full generations of undergraduates in law. As My experience with Chinese visiting scholars and LLM students is that the Chinese universities have done what we do here: teach people to "think like lawyers".
Susan Finder - Distinguished Scholar at Peking University's Transnational School of Law in Shenzhen discusses the role of the recently deceased President of the Supreme People's Court. He played a key role in the internationalization of Chinese law and judiciary - an essential step for China to integrate itself into the world economy. - gwc
SPC President Xiao Yang & internationalizing the Chinese judiciary | Supreme People's Court Monitor
by Susan Finder [Peking University School of Transnational Law (Shenzhen)]
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I’d like to focus one small aspect of his work that likely won’t be considered important enough to be included in his obituaries in either the Chinese or foreign media–his vision, as SPC president, that internationalizing the education of Chinese judges would be beneficial to China. It was done because he was able to take the view at that time that learning about foreign law was beneficial:
In rule of law construction, it is not possible to close the door; copying and blinding transferring [what is done abroad] is not possible: therefore, as for foreign legal civilization, we must creatively absorb the content that conforms to the general principles of the rule of law according to our situation. In fact, a considerable part of our rule of law construction achievements in the past 40 years have been achieved on the basis of absorbing foreign advanced experience. When we formulated the General Principles of Civil Law, the Contract Law, the Property Law, and even the General Principles of Civil Law, we absorbed a lot of advanced concepts and systems from the civil law system and even the Anglo-American legal system. The principle of crime established in the Criminal Law of 1997 is also modern, contains commonalities with the modern rule of law.搞法治建设，关起门来不行，照搬照抄也不行；因此，对外国法律文明，我们要根据自身情况创造性地吸收借鉴那些符合法治一般规律的内容。事实上，四十年来我们的法治建设成就，有相当一部分是在吸收借鉴外国先进经验的基础上取得的。我们制定民法通则、合同法、物权法乃至民法总则时，就大量吸收了大陆法系甚至是英美法系的先进理念和制度；我们在1997年《刑法》中确立的罪刑法定原则，也正是现代法治中共通性的内容。[please feel free to make corrections to this translation]
He considered sending judges abroad an accomplishment that should be included in reports to the NPC:
- More than 200 outstanding young and middle-aged judges have been selected from the national courts to study abroad and in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. More than 100 people have returned from their studies and become the backbone of foreign-related trial operations. (从全国法院选送200多名优秀中青年法官到国外和香港特别行政区进修深造，目前已有百余人学成归来，并成为涉外审判业务骨干.)（2002）
- Continue to organize judges to study and exchange in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, the Macao Special Administrative Region, and abroad.(继续组织法官到香港特别行政区、澳门特别行政区以及国外学习交流。)
