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This chapter looks at the legal profession in the People's Republic of China. U.S. scholars and policy makers concerned with legal development in the People's Republic of China share a deep faith in the value of China developing a legal profession that operates as we would like to think our own does. Indeed, this idea is so deeply ingrained that it is rarely broken out for critical examination but instead is treated as an obvious good, the attainment of which is essentially a matter of time. U.S. portrayals of Chinese legal development whether for scholarly or more policy-oriented ends have tended to take as a given the model of legality generally believed to be in effect in our country today. Only infrequently are its fundamental assumptions questioned or even scrutinized through balanced accounts of its historical development, careful consideration of the interplay of law with other norms and institutions in contemporary U.S. society, or rigorous comparison with the experience of other nations. Unexamined, such assumptions run the risk of leaving us with an impoverished understanding not only of the role that the emerging legal profession is playing in China, but also of both the complexity of legal development there more broadly and the limits of the ideology of professionalism in law.

This chapter summarizes the state of China's courts after twenty years of reform efforts and speculates on the prospects for further necessary reforms of the judicial system. It emphasizes some forces that influence law reform and legal institutions in China today and suggests, now that China has acceded to the World Trade Organization it will have difficulty in meeting the standards that membership in that body will impose on its legal institutions. The courts, formerly scorned as rightist institutions at the end of the 1950's and as bourgeois during the Cultural Revolution, have been rebuilt in a four-level hierarchy and are increasingly being used as the for a in which rights created by legislation are asserted by citizens against each other and, to some extent, against state agencies. The increasing activity of the courts reflects the slowly increasing willingness among many Chinese, especially in the coastal cities, to bring their disputes to court rather than to resort to extra-judicial mediation which has traditionally been the preferred means for settling most civil disputes. The relationship of mediation to adjudication is changing slowly. A system of local committees created for the express purpose of mediating civil, family and some property disputes has been active in China since 1949.

This chapter examines the historical roots of stasis and change in Japanese legal education. Legal education in Japan is now being re-examined and is likely to be overhauled within a decade. This reexamination forms part of a more comprehensive scheme of restructuring the judicial system and the legal profession as a whole, proposed by the Judicial Reform Council. Presently in Japan, legal education is part of the undergraduate curriculum. There are about thirty law faculties or departments housed in national or municipal universities. In addition, there are sixty-five private university law faculties. The total number of undergraduate students studying law at those faculties and departments is about 45,000 per year. A typical law faculty is composed of a department of political science as well as a department of law and offers courses in economics as well as political science. It also offers courses in what is called the basic science of law, which includes foreign laws, legal history, legal philosophy and legal sociology. Generally speaking, major law faculties attract the best of the students who are oriented to social studies and the humanities, who wish to attain leadership positions in government, business or law. Above all, the faculties of national universities have traditionally considered themselves responsible for educating good bureaucrats who play principal roles in national policy making, administration and legislation.

This chapter ponders on the challenge of the floating population of internal migrants in the People's Republic of China. Why should we link the internal migrants of China with the word challenge? Indeed, that people moving about across their own native terrain should be dubbed migrants is already a bit of a puzzle. This is especially the case for the ones in China, since they are very much viewed and dealt with as if outsiders, even outcasts, surely as elements who do not belong where they have arrived. At the heart of the plight of the incoming peasants in cities is the immaturity or less optimistically but conceivably more accurately one might say the stubborn, nagging, ongoing inadequacy of that elusive element, law, in Chinese society today. For could it come of age, could it fulfill its function, law could stand as the bridge that links up the nation with local exclusivism, the full citizen with the sojourning denizen, the subcommunity of the sidelined with the sphere of officialdom. Thus it is up to the law to bring together the discourse of rights with their delivery and to bend the institutional legacies of socialism to fit the immediacy of capitalism. It could also probably manage to tame the madness of the current Chinese marketplace.

This chapter looks at the creation, accommodation and exclusion of outsiders in South Korea. Those describe in this study as outsiders to South Korean society are ethnic Koreans from China, migrant workers from various Asian countries and Chinese residents. The influx of ethnic Koreans from China and migrant workers was a product of the 1990's, amidst the melting down of the Cold War in East Asia and an increasing globalization of labor supply. In coming to terms with this novel experience, Koreans have also awakened to the erstwhile neglected discontent of the Chinese residents who have been with them for generations. Cries for human rights voiced in respect of the treatment of these groups have shaken Koreans' complacency with the nation's transition from authoritarianism to democracy. Furthermore, problems arising from the presence of the three groups have stimulated critical reflection on the opacity and incoherence of Korean law in instituting distinctions between us and them. These problems also pose challenges to the glorification by the Koreans of the assumed homogeneity of their culture and society and their hitherto unquestioned belief that cultural identity, ethnic boundaries, membership of society and state borders should coincide with one another.

This chapter addresses the issue of the political status of transnational workers, a new form of migrant workers in Taiwan. They differ from both the immigrants and conventional migrants in aim and intention. Although migrant and transnational workers may end up settling permanently in the host country, that is not why they move. Students of international migration have seen the phenomenon in terms of immigration and emigration with clear destinations and origins. The assumption is that people are uprooted from their country of birth to settle in a country of their choice. As a great majority of international migration has been from economically underdeveloped countries to the more developed ones, questions are often raised when migrants do not become settlers. The political status of transnational migrant labor has been a source of heated debates in recent times. All countries that receive significant numbers of such laborers, together with their originating states, have wrestled with this issue. Theoretically and normatively, there are also a number of formulations regarding citizenship within a globalized world. As migrant labor increasingly becomes a permanent rather than transient phenomenon, both the state and the society will have to come to terms with the migrants' claim for citizenship, however limited in scope that claim may be.

This chapter discusses the concept of the rule of law in China. Rule of law, like any other important political concept such as justice or equality is an essentially contested concept. Yet the fact that there is room for debate about the proper interpretation of rule of law should not blind us to the broad consensus as to its core meaning and basic elements. At its most basic, rule of law refers to a system in which law is able to impose meaningful restraints on the state and individual members of the ruling elite as captured in the rhetorically powerful if overly simplistic notions of a government of laws, the supremacy of the law and equality of all before the law. The liberal democratic version of rule of law incorporates free market capitalism, multiparty democracy in which citizens may choose their representatives at all levels of government and a liberal interpretation of human rights that gives priority to civil and political rights over economic, social, cultural and collective or group rights. Significantly, however, there is relatively little support for liberal democracy and hence a liberal democratic rule of law, among state leaders, legal scholars, intellectuals or the general public in China.

This chapter discusses property rights and indigenous tradition among early twentieth century Japanese firms. Japanese management history illustrates that institutional constraints have effects that largely track a cross-cultural, pan-historical logic. In this chapter, we draw on empirical research in Japanese economic history to illustrate that logic. During the 1960s, in several sectors Japanese firms are said to have raised much of the money they needed from banks. From this well known fact, many scholars extrapolate to firms pre-war. If equity markets did not provide the funds firms needed in the 1960s, they reason, equity markets must not have done so at the turn of the century either. All this the turn-of-the-century firms accomplished with neither a regulatory apparatus nor corporate law. Japan had no securities regulation until the U.S. imposed one in the late 1940s. It had no corporate law until it passed a Commercial Code in 1890. Even that one did not last. Legislators promptly decided they disliked it and replaced it with another in 1899. Beyond geography, however, in operating and governing their firms investors and managers primarily relied on institutional arrangements based on the modern legal system.

This article presents the preface of the book East Asian Law - Universal Norms and Local Cultures, edited by Arthur Rosett, Lucie Cheng and Margaret Y. K. Woo. The debate over the remarkable economic growth in East Asian societies has tended to emphasize the importance of universal values such as rule of law, in contrast to traditional and other culturally specific mechanisms of social and economic organization. It is far from clear what is connoted by such terms, in particular societies. It seems safe to suggest that the use of such terms as rule of law is linked in the minds of many observers to the particular needs of global economic markets. Some observers complain that such heavy emphasis on universalisms denies or denigrates the role of law in traditional society. Others respond that this emphasis overstates the role of law in modern Western social organization. The heart of the matter is that universalisms and localisms do not operate in inevitable contradiction. The tensions between them are balanced as each society gives rise to particular collections of social norms and institutions including law. By comparing how East Asian societies have accommodated these tensions in dealing with different, specific problems, we hope to learn useful lessons about the potential of law, in all its forms.

This article presents an introduction to the book East Asian Law - Universal Norms and Local Cultures, edited by Arthur Rosett, Lucie Cheng and Margaret Y. K. Woo. This book explores the tension in East Asia between, on the one hand, the trend toward a convergence of legal practices in the direction of a universal model, and on the other hand, a reassertion of local cultural practices including those which define different group identities and which give substance to different ideas about what constitutes justice. This book also explores a wide range of issues related to this key problem, covering especially well China, where resolving differences in conceptions about the rule of law is a key issue as China begins to integrate itself into the World Trade Organization regime.