Keeping a China Studies Legacy Alive: A Note from the New Editors of Chinese Law and Government

Chinese Law and Government was founded in 1968 by James D. Seymour, a scholar committed not just to studying and understanding Chinese politics, but to creating a platform to exchange views, share analysis, and serve the field to that end. The Journal set out to provide China studies with then-rare translations and analysis of Chinese Communist Party (CCP), government and scholarly documents. It was ‘concerned with political science and law in their broadest aspects’ (Seymour, 1968), as Seymour explained in his inaugural issue.

Founded during the Cultural Revolution, it was recognized from the outset that real-world challenges shaped the Journal’s context, content, and mission: the suspension of ‘normal’ platforms and institutions in China led Seymour and colleagues instead to compile what documents they could, which ‘in their way, reveal[ed] much about Chinese politics and law’ (Seymour, 1968). Its translations included laws, regulations, court records, policy directives and official and academic reports. Editors and guest editors then offered valuable insights into the topics covered in each issue and pondered important questions then puzzling the field.

James Tong, Professor of Political Science at University of California, Los Angeles, served as the Journal’s Editor-in-Chief from 1998. But long before taking up this role he was already contributing richly to the Journal. In 1980, he wrote of the underground journals that emerged in China following the 11th Central Committee’s landmark Third Plenum on reform. He wrote of the work of those who ‘set up backyard printing presses and bedroom editorial offices, printed as much as their limited paper and ink supplies allowed, and distributed their publications to outstretched hands at the foot of the Democracy Wall’ (Tong, 1980). ‘After a full year’s blooming and contending’ (Tong, 1980) by those journals, he wrote, Chinese Law and Government had decided to take it upon itself to document them.

After playing a core role in the life of the Journal for four decades—and leading it for two—in 2020 Professor Tong sadly passed away. Though we did not have the great fortune of meeting him, in studying the Journal and its history and learning about his life’s work, one thing that struck us was his obvious commitment not only to rigorous, thoughtful, and critical research on China but also to enabling countless exchanges between scholars in China, the United States and beyond. This legacy permeates the pages of the Journal’s past issues and doubtless remains alive in the hearts of all those he helped and collaborated with.

After a two-year hiatus in the Journal’s publication, in 2022, we were invited to serve as its new editors to get the Journal up and running again. As new editors, we decided to attempt to continue the Journal’s traditions while also moving it forward to keep up with real-world shifts in Chinese law and governance.

Over half a century has passed since Chinese Law and Government’s founding. In that time, China has changed exponentially, as has China studies. The field has ballooned, research topics and methods have proliferated and bifurcated, and the degree of specialization has grown. In step with the development of China’s legal system, and the evolution of the country’s governance model, from the 1990s onwards, the Journal gradually focused a little less on the Party and a lot more on translating and analyzing state laws and regulations. China’s image as an ‘administrative state’ became increasingly apparent, and the Journal’s content and style to some degree mirrored the country’s legal professionalization and reform processes.

Today, we find ourselves in new yet familiar territory. The role of the Party in Chinese politics and governance has again expanded while also changing dramatically. In the ‘New Era,’ as the Party has pushed itself to the forefront of governance, gobbled up state institutions, and taken over certain state functions, the limitations of the ‘state–society’ paradigm so common to China studies are becoming increasingly evident. Researchers of Chinese politics, policy, and law are seeking novel ways to transform the ‘state–society’ paradigm to a ‘party–state–society’ one. The Party itself has undergone sweeping changes while also reinvigorating and revising methods and mechanisms from its Leninist heritage. Given such trends, it seems pertinent to reassert Chinese Law and Government’s inaugural aim of providing a conduit for debate on politics and law ‘in their broadest aspects’ (Seymour, 1968). We attempt to reflect this commitment to thinking broadly about politics and law in Chinese Law and Government’s new Chinese name ‘《中国法与治》’.

Going forward, the Journal seeks to focus on both law and governance. It regards ‘institutions’ as important, but adopts a broad understanding thereof, seeking to explore not only formal, codified laws, regulations, and normative documents but also informal and unwritten rules and social norms. We seek to explore the implementation processes as formal and quasi-formal translate from ‘text’ into ‘reality’ and feed back to ‘text’; the institutionalization and legalization processes of informal rules; and the interactions between the legal system and other rules systems (such as policies, Party regulations, and customs). We particularly hope to provide a platform for research on the interaction between ‘law’ (法)—broadly conceived, including law and Party law—and ‘governance’ (治). Concerned with China’s contemporary realities, we aim to create a platform that welcomes interdisciplinary work and contributions from across different disciplines, hoping to break through the limitations of each of our single disciplines.

We recognize that running a Journal is not easy, nor is re-starting a journal with a long history of esteemed service and countless contributions from scholars deeply knowledgeable about our field. It requires us to consider readers’ needs and balance inheriting the Journal’s traditions with attempting to ‘move with the times’. As a case in point, the Journal was founded at a time when China was closed, field research was all but impossible, and documentary research was the mainstay of China studies research. Document translation has therefore long been one of its core features. But with the launch of ‘opening up’, the emergence of the Internet and, more recently, the tireless work of experts on platforms such as China Law Translate, the NPC Observer, and the Supreme People’s Court Monitor, along with the burgeoning of artificial intelligence, important Chinese legal texts have become far more accessible. We needed to ask ourselves: is there still value in translating documents for publication in this forum? Is this a tradition of the Journal that we should seek to preserve?

At the Journal’s inception, its context, content, and mission were shaped by real-world developments. This is as true today as it was then. As we write this, we have just returned from a three-month research trip to China—our first in three years since pandemic restrictions made in-person fieldwork almost entirely impossible. While the significant possibilities for conducting in-person fieldwork were truly heartening, as too was the warmth and willingness of colleagues in the PRC to collaborate and engage, the challenges of conducting fieldwork of the kind possible in earlier decades of reform and opening were palpable. Despite re-appearing access for fieldwork—and we hope in the future this will grow—documentary research remains a vital primary research method for understanding Chinese politics and law. One abiding reason for this is the central role of ‘documentary politics’ in the Chinese system. Another reason is that while some bilingual versions of laws, regulations, judicial interpretations and such are made readily available, not all important texts have translations, especially those belonging to a broader notion of ‘government’ and ‘governance’, such as ‘Opinions’, normative documents, and Party regulations. Since the earliest days of Chinese Law and Government, when the Journal carried translations of a talk by Lin Biao at a Central Work Conference (“Lin Piao’s talk,” 1968), a criticism of Liu Shaoqi (“Criticism,” 1968), and a CCP Central Committee Notice circulating draft amendments to the PRC Constitution (Spelman, 1972), the Journal has always sought to give a broader view of ‘law’ in the PRC. Third, the process of selecting, translating, interpreting, and highlighting the significance of texts can make a humble but vital contribution to the research community. Even if translations can be easily produced by translation software, well-crafted translations are still of worth. Chinese political and policy document translation cannot (yet) rely entirely on AI; it involves myriad factors to be carefully weighed up and there is usually no ‘best’ choice; those choices themselves and the reasoning behind them are arguably of value to researchers.

With the above in mind, we decided to retain a ‘Document Translation’ section, though its proportion in the Journal is somewhat reduced. In addition to the traditional editors’ and guest editors’ notes on the documents translated and the policy or legal area in which they reside, we are adding a special section for ‘Document Discussion Articles’. These articles parse the selected documents in each issue, highlight their significance to law, policy, or political processes, or offer novel interpretations. From time to time, we will also organize articles discussing the concepts, terminology and discourse used in translated documents.

In the past, research articles accounted for only a small proportion of the Journal. Today, what with the Journal’s own long-standing identity as an interdisciplinary platform for critical analysis on law and governance and the pressing need for scholarship on the deep changes in practice over the past decade in the Chinese system, we seek to develop the Journal into a home for robust research articles on Chinese law and governance, broadly conceived. This transition will take time, as we calibrate to an appropriate ratio between research articles, document translation and analysis, and we warmly welcome feedback from readers and contributors. In the interim, we will continue to ensure that there is a strong correlation between our research articles, document translations, and document discussion articles, and we invite proposals for special issues composed of all three types of material, which will be considered by our editorial board.

Historically, Chinese Law and Government has provided a unique window into the workings of Chinese politics and governance through careful selection, translation, and annotation of original documents. We hope that the Journal can inherit and carry forward the efforts of its forerunners and its countless brilliant contributors and shift the emphasis from being a ‘window’ to being a ‘bridge,’ becoming a medium for exchange between scholars in the PRC and other countries around the world who care about China’s realities. We look forward to working with colleagues toward this goal.