Chinese Legal Culture
We apply a concept of legal culture in order to tackle the challenges of studying Chinese law from an external and comparative perspective. While the context of law is regularly omitted in doctrinal legal research that takes an internal, participant-oriented approach to its object of study, external factors are more relevant for the understanding of foreign law if the people who study such law do not share the same preconceptions and preconceived attitudes as those who create and apply the law. Hence, an approach to the research of Chinese law that is specifically sensitive to the historical, political, economic and institutional conditions of the creation, application and enforcement of law appears most suitable in order to avoid misconceptions and misrepresentations about the meaning and operation of Chinese law.
News and Activities
COIMBRA Group Conference on China
The China Competence Centre of the University of Würzburg (CCCUW) and the Coimbra Group (CG) Global Partnerships Working Group invited colleagues from CG Universities to learn about the current state of EU-China relations among HEIs, to exchange experiences with related national and EU policies, and to discuss ways ahead that allow universities to continue cooperation while raising awareness and mitigating risks.European Universities’ cooperation with China.
Daniel Sprick presented the University of Cologne's Guidelines for Cooperation with China and discused selected issues of Chinese law and legal practice as risk factors for academic cooperation with China.
https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/research/china-competence-centre/events/2024-1/
Publication on Illegal Fundraising in China
Daniel Sprick published a new article on the pocket crime of illegal fundraising in China:
Systemic Convictions: China’s Fundraising Crimes and its Financial System
Abstract
Fundraising crimes are legion in China. And this is not only a criminological observation as the respective provisions of the Criminal Law can be applied in an extremely broad scope of cases, ranging from personal loans or brokering investments for small businesses to platform-based P2P lending operations. Its unclear demarcation produces legal uncertainty that has its root cause not only in vague provisions of the Criminal Law or broad legal interpretations of the judiciary, but also in the systemic function of these crimes. This paper argues that normative analyses about legal (un) certainty and regulatory necessities in the field of illegal fundraising in China need to be widened and additionally include a perspective of political expediency. The financial sector in China is highly dominated by state actors and state-owned banks, which inevitably follow policy directives and form a cornerstone of the regime’s control over the economic system. For the purpose of maintaining this status quo, it is extremely valuable to retain the possibility to criminalize a wide range of financial interactions that would circumvent the state-dominated banking system. Particularly, the crime of “Illegally Absorbing Public Savings” provides the authorities with such a device and should therefore be understood as an important foothold of China’s authoritarian legality in its capital markets. This crime is therefore positioned at the intersection of China’s Leninist notion of ubiquitous control and its market-based economy.
Workshop Chinese Law and Academic Cooperation
On February 19th 2024, Daniel Sprick led a workshop at the RWTH Aachen University on legal dimensions of academic cooperation with China. As part of the ENTRANCE (Expertise & Transfer Network on China & Europe) project, this workshop discussed the Chinese legal system in general and selected issues such as academic freedom, export controls, data security, protection and transfer as well as China's anti-espionage law.
