Law Commons^™

Tech Supremacy: The New Arms Race Between China And The United States, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

Articles

In the brewing tech war between the United States and China, the quest for tech supremacy is in full force. Through enacting a series of laws and policies, China aims to reach its goal of tech supremacy. If China succeeds, U.S. corporations will face a daunting task in competing against Chinese products and services in core industries and in sectors where artificial intelligence and technological breakthroughs reign. This Article is the first to identify and analyze China’s 2022 Law on Science and Technology Progress, Personal Information Protection Law, Made in China 2025, National Intellectual Property Strategies, and digital currency e-CNY; …

Us Trade Policy, China And The Wto (Foreword), Paolo Davide Farah

Book Chapters

In ‘U.S. Trade Policy, China and the WTO’, Nerina Boschiero addresses a key topic in contemporary international economic law and global governance. By focusing on a turning point in global politics and the shaping/framing of trade policy in the U.S.– the election of President Donald Trump sheds light on the tumultuous process of reshaping of global governance. The crisis of multilateralism has been discussed at length in academia and mainstream media. However, little attention has been paid to how the U.S. is reacting to the rise of China in the global order, in practical terms. In particular, focus …

Pandemic As Transboundary Harm: Lessons From The Trail Smelter Arbitration, Russell A. Miller

Scholarly Articles

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused incalculable harm around the world. The fact that this immense harm can be traced back to a localized outbreak in or near Wuhan, China, raises questions about the responsibility China might bear for the pandemic under public international law. Famously applied in the seminal Trail Smelter Arbitration (1938/1941), the Transboundary Harm Principle provides that no state can use or allow the use of its territory in a manner that causes significant harm in the territory of other states. This article does not intend to tap into the unseemly, xenophobic spirit that animates much of the …

Trademarks And Censorship In The Time Of Covid-19, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

Articles

During the devastating year of 2020, China quickly conquered the novel coronavirus and roared back economically while the United States faced staggering deaths and economic losses. But underneath the divergent experience of the two countries is an untold story of trademark and censorship in the time of COVID-19. This Article observes that while the United States Supreme Court has lifted the ban on trademark registrations for unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination, opening the door for offensive COVID-19 trademark applications, China has transformed trademark law into the law for censorship as Chinese authorities press forward to achieve twin victories over the coronavirus and …

Liability Beyond Law: Conceptions Of Fairness In Chinese Tort Cases, Rachel E. Stern, Benjamin L. Liebman, Wenwa Gao, Xiaohan Wu

Faculty Scholarship

Empirical work consistently finds that Chinese courts resolve civil cases by finding a compromise solution. But beyond this split-it-down-the-middle tendency, when and how do Chinese courts arrive at decisions that feel “fair and just” in cases in which they invoke those ideas? Drawing on a data set of 9,485 tort cases, we find that Chinese courts impose liability on two types of parties with ethical, but not legal, obligation to victims: (1) participants in a shared activity and (2) those who control a physical space. In these cases, Chinese courts stretch the law to spread losses through communities and to …

Public Ownership And The Wto In A Post Covid-19 Era: From Trade Disputes To A 'Social' Function, Paolo Davide Farah, Davide Zoppolato

Articles

Public ownership is closely bound to the need of the government to protect and guarantee the well-being of its citizens. Where the market cannot, or does not want to, provide goods and services, the State uses different tools to intervene, influence, and control some aspects of the private sphere of expression of its citizens in the name and interest of the collectivity. Although, in the past century, this behavior was accepted as one of the expressions of the public authority and part of the social contract, this perception has shifted partially in accordance with the wave of privatization programs initiated …

Manufacturing Innovation, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

Articles

Using intellectual property assets as the proxy for innovation measures, this paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the legal and policy strategies that form the foundation for China's new role as the global manufacturer of innovation. Manufacturing innovation is evident through China's multi-prong approach regarding intellectual property production and maximization. Significantly, among many other policies that target innovation, China encourages the production of innovation by accepting patents and trademarks as collateral assets for financing. Entrepreneurs can quickly obtain loans against their portfolios of patents and trademarks. China also requires enterprises seeking to undergo an initial public offering (IPO) on the …

Retooling Sanctions: China’S Challenge To The Liberal International Order, Timothy Webster

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Tom Ginsburg has produced yet another classic of transnational law, political science, and international relations. Democracies and International Law yields important insights into the democratic nature of international law but cautions that authoritarian states can apply these very legal technologies for repressive or anti-democratic purposes. Building on Ginsburg’s theories of mimicry and repurposing, this contribution highlights the role of both techniques in the creation of China’s economic sanctions program. On the one hand, China has developed a basic set of tools to impose economic sanctions—a key instrument in the liberal international toolkit—on foreign entities and persons. In so doing, …

Revolt Against The U.S. Hegemony: Judicial Divergence In Cyberspace, Dongsheng Zang

Articles

This Article contributes to our understanding of the current state of cyber law. The global perspective demonstrates an almost uniform response to the U.S. law in cyberspace from all of America's major trading partners. In the past, comparative studies tended to focus on a single jurisdiction-typically, the European Union-and compared it with the United States. This approach, informative as it was, significantly understated the gravity of the differences between that jurisdiction and the United States. Fundamentally, it was based on an American-centric outlook with primary interests in building convergence models. In cyberspace, however, this is simply not helpful. In recent …

Games Without Frontiers: The Increasing Importance Of Intellectual Property Rights In The People’S Republic Of China, James M. Cooper

Faculty Scholarship

Intellectual property (“IP”) protection in the People's Republic of China has been murky and amorphous. The country is currently enjoying a historic era with significant infrastructure and investment projects occurring as the Chinese consumer society substantially expands. These simultaneous trends require that China commit to the securitization and protection of IP rights to sustain its rapid economic growth.

Assessing China’S Environmental Ngo Public Interest Litigation Against The U.S. Citizen Suit Model, Huishihan Wang

Dissertations & Theses

This dissertation introduces the U.S. and China’s environmental governance evolution, the background of their private enforcement provisions, including each country’s environmental legislative, administrative, and judicial development before establishing private enforcement. After the introduction, the second section examines the U.S. environmental citizen suits’ origin, environmental movements during the 1960s and 1970s, and pioneer ENGOs’ legal experiences. Statutory provisions are reviewed in various aspects in order to fully present this significant U.S. private enforcement measure. The third section analyzes the trajectory of Chinese ENGO EPIL development, including the provisions and typical actions according to several scattered provisions. Section four compares the theoretical …

Delaware's Global Competitiveness, William J. Moon

Faculty Scholarship

For about a hundred years, Delaware has been the leading jurisdiction for corporate law in the United States. The state, which deliberately embarked on a mission to build a haven for corporate law in the early twentieth century, now supplies corporate charters to over two thirds of Fortune 500 companies and a growing share of closely held companies. But Delaware’s domestic dominance masks the important and yet underexamined issue of whether Delaware maintains its competitive edge globally.

This Article examines Delaware’s global competitiveness, documenting Delaware’s surprising weakness competing in the emerging international market for corporate charters. It does so principally …

Lessons From China's Response To Covid-19: Shortcomings, Successes, And Prospects For Reform In China's Regulatory State, Jacques Delisle, Shen Kui

All Faculty Scholarship

China’s response to COVID-19 offers a case study of law, the regulatory state and governance in China. The costly delay in the initial response reflected distinctive features of the Chinese system, including perverse incentives local-level officials face to try to cover up problems, fragmentated institutions and rules, and politically weak public health bureaucracies. After the initial shortcomings, China’s largely successful efforts to contain the pandemic also reflected defining features of the Chinese system, including a highly capable, centralized and authoritarian party-state that could mobilize vast resources, coordinate across fractious institutions, create ad hoc government and party leadership bodies, and deploy …

Regulating E-Cigarettes: Why Policies Diverge, Eric A. Feldman

All Faculty Scholarship

This paper, part of a festschrift in honor of Professor Malcolm Feeley, explores the landscape of e-cigarette policy globally by looking at three jurisdictions that have taken starkly different approaches to regulating e-cigarettes—the US, Japan, and China. Each of those countries has a robust tobacco industry, government agencies entrusted with protecting public health, an active and sophisticated scientific and medical community, and a regulatory structure for managing new pharmaceutical, tobacco, and consumer products. All three are signatories of the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, all are signatories of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, …

Inefficiency Of Specific Performance As A Contractual Remedy In Chinese Courts: An Empirical And Normative Analysis, Lei Chen, Larry A. Dimatteo

UF Law Faculty Publications

This article investigates the values and latent policies, which have shaped the development of Chinese law in the area of the availability of specific performance (SP) as a contractual remedy. The National People’s Congress (Legislature) and Supreme People’s Court in China have addressed the remedial structure of Chinese contract law, namely, the availability of the remedy of SP as opposed to the awarding of damages-only. The law is clear that the remedies of SP and damages are ordinary remedies that a claimant is free to choose between. The question that is confronted in this article is whether in practice the …

Hostile Takeover Regimes In Asia: A Comparative Approach, Umakanth Varottil, Wai Yee Wan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The market for corporate control is animportant corporate governance mechanism for the discipline of corporatemanagers. However, the process and substance of the regulation of hostiletakeovers differs remarkably among various jurisdictions. Existing andinfluential scholarship has focused on the differences in regulation between UnitedStates (US) and the United Kingdom (UK), with the explanations being founded ininterest group politics. Influential as it is, the question is whether thetheory can be extended outside of the US and the UK, particularly to theirlegal transplants in Asia? In the last few decades, many of the Asianjurisdictions have drawn heavily from the US and the UK when …

Expropriation In The Name Of Rights: Transferable Development Rights (Tdrs), The Bundle Of Sticks And Chinese Politics, Shitong Qiao

Faculty Scholarship

Through an in-depth empirical investigation, this article discloses for the first time how and why land reform programs in the name of empowering and enriching farmers have been serving the purpose of Chinese local governments to compromise the rights revolution in the Chinese national expropriation regime. The concept of “transferable development rights” (TDRs) is simple: development rights from one parcel of land are lifted up and transferred to another. Upon a detailed examination of land tickets in Chongqing and Chengdu, the southwestern Chinese application of TDRs, this article reveals that local governments in both cities have created schemes of land …

When The Chinese Intellectual Property System Hits 35, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

This article explores what it means for the Chinese intellectual property system to hit 35. It begins by briefly recapturing the system’s three phases of development. It discusses the system’s evolution from its birth all the way to the present. The article then explores three different meanings of a middle-aged Chinese intellectual property system – one for intellectual property reform, one for China, and one for the TRIPS Agreement and the global intellectual property community.

Exclusionary Megacities, Wendell Pritchett, Shitong Qiao

All Faculty Scholarship

Human beings should live in places where they are most productive, and megacities, where information, innovation and opportunities congregate, would be the optimal choice. Yet megacities in both China and the U.S. are excluding people by limiting housing supply. Why, despite their many differences, is the same type of exclusion happening in both Chinese and U.S. megacities? Urban law and policy scholars argue that Not-In-My-Backyard (NIMBY) homeowners are taking over megacities in the U.S. and hindering housing development therein. They pin their hopes on an efficient growth machine that makes sure “above all, nothing gets in the way of building.” …

Recognition Of Foreign Judgments In China: The Liu Case And The 'Belt And Road' Initiative, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

In June, 2017, the Wuhan Intermediate People's Court became the first Chinese court to recognize a U.S. judgment in the case of Liu Li v. Tao Li & Tong Wu. The Liu case is a significant development in Chinese private international law, but represents more than a single decision in a single case. It is one piece of a developing puzzle in which the law on the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments in China is a part of a larger set of developments. These developments are inextricably tied to the “One Belt and One Road,” or “Belt and …

China And Beps, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Haiyan Xu

Articles

This article provides an overview of China’s reaction to the G20/OECD Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) project. From 2013 to 2015, the OECD developed a series of actions designed to address BEPS activities by multinational enterprises, culminating in a final report of 15 action steps. The article reviews and explains China’s reaction to the BEPS project and its actions in detail, with a particular focus on transfer pricing issues. It shows that China has actively participated in both developing and implementing the BEPS project. The article further suggests that in the post-BEPS era, China is expected to implement the …

Rights-Weakening Federalism, Shitong Qiao

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines whether federalism protects land rights in China from two dimensions. I first compare national law with local institutions of eminent domain, revealing that local governments take much more land than the national government approves, frequently violating, tweaking, and challenging national law. I next examine the impact of interjurisdictional competition on the development of local land institutions, demonstrating that local governments are weakening individual land rights for the benefits of mobile capital. Overall, Chinese federalism weakens rather than strengthens individual land rights and should be called rights-weakening federalism.

This China case also has general theoretical implications. Leading property …

China's 'Corporatization Without Privatization' And The Late 19th Century Roots Of A Stubborn Path Dependency, Nicholas Howson

Articles

This Article analyzes the contemporary program of “corporatization without privatization” in the People's Republic of China (PRC) directed at China's traditional state-owned enterprises (SOEs) through a consideration of long ago precursor enterprise establishments--starting from the last Chinese imperial dynasty's creation of “government-promoted/-supervised, merchant-financed/-operated” (guandu shangban) firms in the latter part of the nineteenth century. While analysts are tempted to see the PRC corporations with listings on international exchanges that dominate the global economy and capital markets as expressions of “convergence,” this Article argues that such firms in fact show deeply embedded aspects of path dependency unique to the Chinese context …

A Primer On China’S Bribery Regulation: Status Quo, Development, Drawback, And Proposed Solution, Fanyu Zeng

Upper Level Writing Requirement Research Papers

Today, the People's Republic of China (hereinafter China) has become one of the largest economic entities in the world. With the development of China, the problem of bribery has imposed more negative impacts on China’s government and market. This paper is on China’s current regulations on bribery.

This paper is divided into six parts: (1) Introduction to China’s legal regulation on bribery; (2) Who can be bribed in China? (3) What constitutes bribery under China laws? (4) Defenses against bribery charges; (5) Punishment and Liability (Criminal Punishment, Administrative Punishment, and Private Action); and (6) Drawbacks and Proposals for China’s anti-bribery …

Voice And Exit As Accountability Mechanisms: Can Foot-Voting Be Made Safe For The Chinese Communist Party?, Roderick M. Hills Jr., Shitong Qiao

Faculty Scholarship

According to Albert 0. Hirschman's famous dichotomy, citizens can express their preferences with their "voice" (by voting with ballots to elect better representatives) or by "exit" (by voting with their feet to choose better places to live). Suppose, however, that ballot-voting is ineffective: Can exit not merely aid but also replace voice? Using the People's Republic of China, a party state without elective democracy as a case study, we argue that exit is not a substitute for, but rather a complement to, voice. China's bureaucratic promotion system plays the same role that local elections do in the United States, promoting …

Preface, Robin H. Huang, Nicholas C. Howson

Book Chapters

This volume collects the fruits of an unprecedented international academic conference, ‘Public and Private Enforcement of Company Law and Securities Regulation – China and the World’, which was held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in December 2014 and convened by the Centre for Financial Regulation and Economic Development (CFRED) of the Faculty of Law of CUHK, the University of Michigan Law School and the Lieberthal Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. The aim of the conference was to gather, in one place and at one time, some of the world’s top academic specialists, …

Slides: Rivers And People In The Neotropics: Social And Ecological Science For Environmental Flows, Elizabeth P. Anderson

Coping with Water Scarcity in River Basins Worldwide: Lessons Learned from Shared Experiences (Martz Summer Conference, June 9-10)

Presenter: Elizabeth P. Anderson, Florida International University

38 slides

Chinese Reception And Transplantation Of Western Contract Law, Wang Jingen, Larry A. Dimatteo

UF Law Faculty Publications

The transformation of the People's Republic of China (China) into a market economy and its ascendancy into a global economic power increases the importance of studying its private laws (contract, torts, property, and unjust enrichment). The twin pillars of a market economy are private property and contract law. This Article will focus on the latter of the two pillars. The evolution of Chinese contract law provides an opportunity to study the influences of foreign laws and the formal transplantation of foreign and international law into a different cultural and legal tradition. China's formation of private contract law, beginning in the …

Cultural Paradigms In Property Institutions, Taisu Zhang

Faculty Scholarship

Do “cultural factors” substantively influence the creation and evolution of property institutions? For the past several decades, few legal scholars have answered affirmatively. Those inclined towards a law and economics methodology tend to see property institutions as the outcome of self-interested and utilitarian bargaining, and therefore often question the analytical usefulness of “culture.” The major emerging alternative, a progressive literature that emphasizes the social embeddedness of property institutions and individuals, is theoretically more accommodating of cultural analysis but has done very little of it.

This Article develops a “cultural” theory of how property institutions are created and demonstrates that such …

Protecting The State From Itself? Regulatory Interventions In Corporate Governance And The Financing Of China's 'State Capitalism', Nicholas C, Howson

Book Chapters

From the start of China’s “corporatization without privatization” process in the late 1980s, a Chinese corporate governance regime, apparently shareholder-empowering and determined by enabling legal norms, has been altered by mandatory governance mechanisms imposed by a state administrative agency, the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC). This has been done to protect minority shareholders against exploitation by the Party-state controlling shareholders, the power behind China’s “state capitalism.” This chapter reviews the path of this benign intervention by the CSRC and the structural reasons for it, and then speculates on why this novel example of the China’s “fragmented authoritarianism” continues to be …