Lhe standing committee of the National People’s Congress, the legislative body of communist China, adopted, on 1er September, the law on foreign state immunity. From 1er January 2024, they will now be able to be prosecuted in Chinese courts. Added to a series of regulations intended to govern the activities of foreigners, whether individuals or legal entities such as companies, this new law constitutes, according to the official press release, an important step to promote “the rule of law guided by Xi Jinping Thought”. The war with the United States, first economic then technological, has become legal. Which is not without consequences for the business world.
On February 26, The Communist Party of China (CPC) and the government solemnly issued a joint guideline titled “How to Consolidate Education and Legal Doctrine in the New Era.” In this document, where the name of Xi Jinping is omnipresent, “constitutionalism”, “the separation of the three powers” And “independence of justice” are qualified as“erroneous ideas” of the West. According to this text, China must build its own Marxist legal order “with red DNA” and promote “legal doctrine imbued with Xi’s thought”. Great planner, the government orders the establishment of a global order of law “with Chinese characteristics” before 2035…
Because Beijing does not intend to confine its “made in China” law within its borders. The party urges its academic jurists to strengthen international exchanges in order to increase “the narrative power and influence of legal theory with Chinese characteristics” abroad. But out of modesty… or prudence, Chinese academics seem reluctant to share the fruits of their reflections on the spirit of President Xi’s law with their Western colleagues, by resorting to the game of (non-)translation. On their Chinese homepages, the law faculties of the two most prestigious universities – Tsinghua and Beida (Beijing University) – display exemplary attendance, claiming to study Xi’s legal theory. But they don’t say a word about it on their English sites…
Takeover
Plunging into the tide of globalization since 2001, the People’s Republic had nonetheless embraced the American-European concept of the rule of law (rule of law), intrinsically linked to democracy, thus breaking with the Maoist era, where the profession of lawyer was quite simply banned and the courts liquidated. The world of law, in China and abroad, then expressed a certain enthusiasm for the legal development of the future second world power. In 2003, Paris launched an ambitious legal cooperation program to train “one hundred Chinese magistrates in France” in order to “putting law where there was none”, in the words of Pascal Clément, the then Keeper of the Seals. During his visit to China in 2012, US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer was delighted to fill the lecture hall at Tsinghua University and explain the US Constitution to the business magazine Caixin in Shanghai.
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