The point where this history begins must also be the starting point of the train of thought, and its further progress will be simply the reflection, in abstract and theoretically consistent form, of the historical course.
Friedrich Engels, review of Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)
Is there a measure on earth? There is none.
Friedrich Hölderlin, In lovely blueness (1808)
Roman Herzog, then German Federal President and formerly President of the Federal Constitutional Court, once commented on Chinese legal history in a conversation with German legal historians. He noted that he found it more difficult to communicate with Chinese jurists than with jurists from the former communist countries of Eastern Europe. He attributed this to the fact that China had received the Roman-law tradition only to a “limited extent”. The legal historian speaking with him tactfully added that, in China’s case, the language barrier had placed Chinese scholars at some distance from their European colleagues in terms of the required “terminological precision and sharpness”.
Exactly thirty years after that conversation, the impression of German legal historians might well be revised by their encounters with a new generation of Chinese colleagues. These Chinese scholars are highly familiar with works from the German tradition. Even among those who study China’s own legal tradition, never having heard of Savigny or Jhering would be regarded as a serious form of ignorance. Once this impression is updated, German scholars may find themselves surrounded by a subtle sense of pleasure: after all, they have indeed heard that “so-and-so” went to China and received an enthusiastic welcome. Broad cooperation with Chinese institutions has also allowed some EU officials with a Dr. title to discover, among Chinese students, the real respect that this title can still command.
Yet German colleagues are now gradually discovering another side of this story. Some of the Chinese jurists who speak warmly with them return to China and, once they begin writing in Chinese, launch unsparing critiques of these European legal concepts. They also promote the idea that China’s knowledge system should become fully independent from the Western idea of the “rule of law.” In the field of legal history, Chinese legal historians are now discussing, with great enthusiasm, “Chinese legal system” or “Chinese legal culture”. These concepts are gradually replacing “legal history,” a term inherited from old Europe. Chinese legal historians have identified their path here: what they study is not a history that belongs merely to the “past,” but a living culture and a legal system that continues to exert influence. More importantly, this culture and legal system are understood as profoundly distinctive and specifically Chinese. Institutions with names such as “Advanced Institutes for Chinese Legal Civilisation” or “Institutes for the Chinese Law System and Legal Civilisation” also remind people that “building an independent knowledge system” is an ongoing and very serious movement in Chinese academia.
An independent knowledge system? Does this mean that Chinese scholars intend to refuse dialogue? Not quite. Whether in legal history or in doctrinal legal studies, Chinese scholars remain visibly active in the West. But how should we understand this epistemic movement taking place in China? Some might say: “Ach, what is so surprising about that? Did Prof. Dr. Herzog not already warn us?” China, after all, received the Western spirit only to a limited degree; the law as understood by the Chinese is ultimately and essentially different from the law as understood by Europeans. This impression is further reinforced in the mass media: if China, Turkey, and Russia form the matrix of “another world,” how could law possibly be exempt from it?
Yet the question can still be asked: was the Chinese embrace of the Western legal tradition merely a hypocritical performance? Or is it possible that it was precisely the deep contact between Chinese and Western epistemic communities that made a formulation such as “independent knowledge system” possible in the first place?
Autonomy and Inheritance
As a movement of the People’s Republic aimed at mobilising scholars in the humanities and social sciences, the project of “building an independent knowledge system” had already shown early signs of taking shape in statements made under Xi Jinping’s leadership, ten years ago. In 2016, Xi cited Mao Zedong’s 1944 conversation with the journalist Günther Stein:
Our attitude is that of critical acceptance of our own historical heritage and of foreign thought. We are against blind acceptance as well as blind rejection of any ideas. We Chinese must think with our own brains and must decide for ourselves what can grow on our own soil.
By invoking this passage, Xi expressed the hope that Chinese philosophy and the social sciences would “put forward theoretical perspectives marked by subjectivity and originality, and build disciplinary, academic, and discursive systems with distinctive characteristics of our own.” In 2022, Xi condensed this vision into the concept of an “independent system of knowledge” (自主知识体系), which was formally established in 2024—at the Third Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee—as a key priority of the Communist Party of China’s ideological work going forward.
Within this ambitious project, Xi has shown a pronounced preference for the concept of “culture,” repeatedly asserting that “culture concerns the foundations and destiny of the nation”. Also, in as early as 2016, Xi introduced the notion of “cultural confidence” and incorporated it into the matrix of path confidence, theory confidence, and institution confidence. In 2023, this idea was further developed into an explicit concern with “cultural inheritance,” reflecting Xi’s hope that the Communist Party of China could sustain the inheritance of historical China in its own way.
Under the combined influence of these two concepts, legal history, whose legal dimension corresponds to the general imperative of constructing an independent system of legal knowledge, and whose historical dimension corresponds to its particular mission toward the cultural inheritance, has become a point of convergence for these ideological priorities. In 2024, the 94-year-old legal historian Zhang Jinfan was awarded the title of “People’s Educator” by Xi Jinping, the highest honour the ruling party confers upon teachers. Legal history is thus expected to contribute to the construction of an independent legal knowledge system through the identification and articulation of legal culture.
It must be emphasised that this process is not one in which the directives are issued by the leadership and simply carried out by scholars. In reality, a considerable number of intellectuals participated in the formation of the leadership’s own discourse. Many of them had, over the past several decades, played a leading role in introducing Western intellectual traditions to the Chinese public, and it was in the course of this very process that their own orientation began to shift.
The Conflict over the Ancient and the Modern, China and the West
To understand the intellectual current that has risen in China over the past decade, we need to return to the 1980s. At that time, the People’s Republic was still rebuilding its values and ideas from the ruins of the Cultural Revolution, and the question of competition between Chinese and Western civilisations—interrupted since the Republican-era 1940s—once again moved to the centre of debate.
However, if intellectual debates in the 1940s still unfolded largely between right-wing cultural nationalism and left-wing social democracy or communism, by the 1980s the political campaigns of the preceding decades had already destroyed the foundations of those Republican-era debates. Social-democratic intellectuals were largely purged in the 1950s. Cultural nationalism was shattered during the Cultural Revolution. Communism, for its part, was kept at a distance by the Chinese public of the 1980s, in view of the grave consequences of Stalinism and Maoism. The three ideologies that once shaped Chinese subjectivity could no longer meet the needs of the People’s Republic.
Deng Xiaoping’s leadership established “modernisation” as the national goal of the post-revolutionary era. In response, Chinese intellectuals at the time called for a “New Enlightenment”, though its meaning remained vague. Learning from the outside world and re-establishing subjectivity had to be achieved at the same time. What was needed was an entirely new genealogy of knowledge through which this complex cultural nation could be reconsidered and understood. The universities, now restored as academic institutions, took in intellectuals who survived the revolution. Using every possible channel, they acquired books from the Western traditions of the humanities and social sciences, then translated them to supply the reborn People’s Republic with the knowledge of “modernity.”
In this intellectual movement, later known as “culture fever,” no figure generated more heat among Chinese intellectuals than Martin Heidegger. Heidegger’s destructuring of the ontological tradition of Western philosophy produced two seemingly contradictory effects in China. On the one hand, his critical stance toward the Western tradition gave Chinese intellectuals confidence with the New Enlightenment, turning “anti-tradition is the newest tradition” into a resonant slogan. On the other hand, Heidegger’s “poetics of dwelling” allowed Chinese intellectuals to see a new opportunity for Chinese philosophy, once relegated by Hegel to the status of “moral teachings”, to be valued again. Heidegger offered Chinese intellectuals a different path within the radically self-referential critique of reason, one distinct from those of Hegel and Marx. This greatly eased the nerves of intellectuals who had spent decades singing the praises of “materialism,” and enabled China’s own cultural tradition, through a new language of the social sciences, to step onto the stage and become a topic of debate.
In 1985, the young philosopher Gan Yang published an essay entitled The Conflict over the Ancient and the Modern, China and the West (古今东西之争) (Gan, 1987). In Gan’s view, China’s cultural tradition does not move towards modernity by choosing sides between China and the West. Rather, it proceeds from the modern condition in which it already finds itself, continuously reshaping tradition, uncovering possibilities that have been obscured in the course of transmission, and then bringing those possibilities into focus through the optics of modernity. New demands generated by modernity allow fragments forgotten by dominant narratives to reappear, and scholars are called upon to identify the significant absences within historical narratives. For this reason, Gan opposed cultural conservatism, particularly the New Confucian approach promoted by overseas Chinese intellectual communities. He argued that the task of Chinese intellectuals was not to revive Confucian culture, but to reassess the Chinese cultural tradition as a whole, remove Confucianism from its privileged position, and reorganise a form of scientific rationality rooted in Chinese culture yet not dominated by Confucian doctrine.
Toward a Chinese Special Path
As China moved into the 1990s, the setback of political democratisation and the neoliberal shock that followed brought the solidarity of the New Enlightenment Chinese intellectuals to an abrupt end. These intellectuals, already familiar with Western intellectual traditions, were no longer satisfied with the concept of “Enlightenment.” They sought instead a more nuanced understanding of both the West and of China. The internal conflicts of modernity also led to the fragmentation of Chinese intellectuals and the feudalisation of public space. While the West was absorbed in the excitement of the “end of history,” the feelings of Chinese intellectuals were far more complicated. The class divisions produced by market reform divided intellectuals in their attitudes toward capitalism: some warmly embraced globalisation, while others hoped to revisit the socialist ideal. The 1999 NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia, meanwhile, made the Chinese public feel a sense of betrayal by the West, and reactivated the historical memory of “the Century of Humiliation.” At this point, Heidegger no longer played the liberating role he had played in the 1980s. Instead, he became a prophet: how the West, Western capitalism, and the worship of technology would endanger a Chinese form of poetic life seemed, as it turned out, to have already been prefigured in Heidegger’s writings.
Amid these many doubts about the West, the reading horizons of Chinese intellectuals also expanded from Western thinkers to their own neighbours, the Asian intellectuals. The Asian Values Debate encouraged Chinese intellectuals to warm again to cultural conservatism, especially by linking their own “special path” to Confucian culture in order to mark their difference from neoliberalism and the Western camp. This was also reflected in the way Chinese intellectuals at the turn of the century critically adopted New Confucianism. New Confucianism was no longer used, as cultural nationalism had been in the 1940s, to imagine a democratic path through native resources. Rather, it was used to explain why China, too, would succeed, just as Taiwan and Singapore had done in an era of globalisation.
The leading figure of the New Enlightenment, Gan Yang himself, embodied this dramatic transformation. At the turn of the millennium, a group of young intellectuals gathered around Gan Yang, forming a circle that quickly went on to occupy influential positions in public debate and underwent a rapid conservative turn. They moved towards an affirmation of the establishment, and in turn received a positive response from the establishment.
In 2005, Gan Yang proposed “unifying the three traditions” (通三统) in a provocative lecture (Gan, 2005). The “three traditions” referred to Confucianism, Maoism, and Dengism. In the discussion, he recalled with some sarcasm the contempt shown by Western observers toward China around the time of its accession to the WTO, and how China’s successful economic transformation overturned their assumptions. In his view, the three traditions in twentieth-century China all laid the foundations for the country’s economic success: Confucianism preserved the continuity of a civilisation “entirely external to the West”; Maoism prevented China from falling into a Soviet-style centrally planned economy; and Dengism brought economic liberalism. This time, Gan Yang fiercely opposed not cultural conservatism, but universalism. He argued that different civilisations in the world inhabit different historical times, and that China’s enormous social changes at present made it closer to Britain in the early phase of the Industrial Revolution. Faced with the vulgarisation brought about by globalisation, Chinese culture therefore had to end its state of intellectual division and return to the “grand unity” (大一统), in order to resist that universalism and firmly pursue China’s special path.
Notably, a significant proportion of scholars associated with Gan Yang’s circle came from legal studies. One example is Jiang Shigong, formerly a professor at Peking University Law School, who has been particularly favoured under the current establishment. He now serves as president of Minzu University of China, an institution explicitly dedicated to the ethnic unity of China. Jiang Shigong was once a follower of Friedrich Hayek, but later turned to Carl Schmitt and found an anchor in Schmitt’s thought. He argued that the most innovative aspect of jurisprudence in the People’s Republic was its shift from a “politics of recognition” to a “politics of revolution” (Jiang, 2024). China, like Japan, once built a continental legal system fundamentally in order to gain recognition from Western universalism and acceptance into the international order. The People’s Republic, however, overturned this logic and resisted the order of global empire. Its legislation generated through the living practice of the people meant that law was no longer external to the people. Facing the corruption of Pax Americana, China had a responsibility to build a rule of law grounded in its own civilisation, and to provide a knowledge system that unified traditional Chinese law, continental law, and socialist law (Jiang, 2019). This was a great struggle against the United States. In this line of argument, it is not difficult to see the double influence that Gan Yang and Schmitt had on him.
Two Socialist Corollaries and Virtue Politics
Under the influence of these scholars, the leadership under Xi Jinping has come to see itself as both capable of, and responsible for, resolving the conflict between the ancient and the modern, China and the West. As Xi has put it, “after long-term efforts, we are more qualified than any previous era to solve the ‘controversy between ancient and modern China and the West’”. The new spirit of China-rooted “scientific rationality” is identified with “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The core of this new ideology differs both from Soviet socialism and from democratic socialism; it is closer to a theory of development.
Socialism is translated by Xi’s brains into an interpretation of China’s historical path of development, and this interpretation takes the form of two corollaries. The first corollary, long upheld by the Communist Party of China since Deng Xiaoping, is the principle of integrating “the basic principles of Marxism with China’s specific reality”. The result of this integration is a nationalist doctrine of development, a form of pragmaticism whose flexibility and internal consistency, tested by history, are regarded as more meaningful criteria than the abstract opposition between authoritarianism and democracy. As long as the traditional ideals of “Enrich the Country, Strengthen the Armed Forces” (富国强兵) and “the People Living and Working in Peace and Contentment” (安居乐业) can be realised—or, in modern jargon, as long as state capacity can be enhanced—the means employed may span millennia and draw selectively on whatever proves most effective. It is precisely these means that together constitute China’s “unwritten constitution.”
Most strikingly, these intellectuals derive from the traditions of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss a conception of Virtue Politics. This form of politics seeks to avoid the disorder associated with mass politics and populism, and instead aims at a mode of moral governance that safeguards justice and maximises the welfare of the community. It is this Virtue Politics that is presented in China as socialism with Chinese characteristics.
Here, the pivotal role assumed by the legal history discipline becomes apparent. China’s distinctiveness lies in the fact that, while developing its material civilisation, it has not abandoned its spiritual civilisation, thereby sustaining Virtue Politics. Yet in cultivating such a spiritual civilisation, China has no external model to follow; it can only excavate its own traditions. To give one example: East Germany also possessed Marxism-Leninism, as does China, but it lacked the particular resources embedded in Chinese tradition. The failure of the East German path therefore does not and should not imply the failure of China’s path. On the contrary, history is taken to have judged China’s distinctive path to be a successful one.
From this perspective, socialism with Chinese characteristics under Xi Jinping acquires a second corollary: “integrating the basic principles of Marxism with China’s traditional culture.” As Xi himself has stated:
If there is no Chinese civilization of 5,000 years, how can there be any Chinese characteristics? If it is not with Chinese characteristics, how can we have the road of socialism with Chinese characteristics that is as successful as we are today? Only by basing ourselves on the magnificent Chinese civilization history of more than 5,000 years can we truly understand the historical inevitability, cultural connotation and unique advantages of the Chinese road.
The thought of the late jurist Liu Haibo of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences offers a concentrated example of how these two corollaries developed in the contexts of jurisprudence and legal history. Like Jiang Shigong, Liu in his early years was a Hayek-ian constitutional-law scholar. Hayek’s liberalism made him especially alert to the “conceit of reason,” and led him to take a negative view of the Enlightenment spirit. In particular, he argued that the development of Enlightenment thought in China “failed to achieve its original purpose; what it was supposed to achieve instead sank without a trace.”
The Communist Party of China’s victory in the civil war, in Liu’s view, came from Mao’s activation of China’s indigenous spiritual civilisation, which inspired the peasants to follow him. The terror of the later revolutions, however, resulted from Mao’s departure from traditional values and his turn toward a radical universalism. This caused both political science and jurisprudence to degenerate into a certain kind of sociology, depriving them of any ethical value of their own. It was therefore necessary to restore the dimension of virtue politics within them. This could only be drawn from China’s own mainstream morals, rather than imposed through foreign and abstract theories of human rights. The successful path taken by the Party after the Cultural Revolution was, precisely, a departure from Enlightenment-style radical revolution and a return to the traditional practices of Chinese society.
For this reason, as early as 2012, Liu Haibo argued that contemporary Chinese must “form our own system and build our own glory” (自成体系，自建光荣). The fundamental value of socialism in the People’s Republic, he claimed, lies in its reflection on, critique of, and autonomous appropriation of the West, through which it ultimately surpasses Western modernity. Liu further fused Virtue Politics with postcolonial theory. Since Western civilisation itself was built at the cost of colonial suffering, then, “in moral terms, China should not transform itself into a modern Western civilisation. In practical-possible terms, China cannot transform itself into a modern Western civilisation.”
Legal History for the Messiah
Within the discipline of law, doctrinal fields represent the material civilisation, while legal history represents the spiritual civilisation. Although China’s doctrinal legal scholarship originates in the West, its success is understood to depend on the virtues supplied by China’s jurisprudence and legal history. Legal history is thus required to actively uncover the “virtues” embedded in China’s legal tradition and to establish them as the foundation of an independent system of knowledge. For Xi Jinping and the group of intellectuals associated with him, the construction of such an independent system is not aimed at decoupling from, or exhibiting hostility towards, the West. Rather, it is driven by the conviction that Virtue Politics, given China’s distinctiveness, cannot be derived from Western sources and must instead be excavated by Chinese legal historians themselves.
If socialism with Chinese characteristics means that the Communist Party of China can integrate the state and provide a super-order, thereby creating the flexible conditions for development and realising Virtue Politics, then legal history must not only demonstrate that this model of governance has historical roots and carries forward classical Chinese political ideals. Chinese legal historians should also keep supplying intellectual resources and ethical justification for the further development of this model. They should be good scribes and exegetes for a Chinese normative canon, which is different from the Western canon.
Developing a Chinese canon from Chinese legal history, however, does not mean rejecting the Western canon. Rather, it means searching within China’s own history for an alternative revelation towards good governance. Catholic forms of “pastoral care” and “governance” are, of course, admirable, and Chinese legal scholars have long shown enthusiasm for translating legal works rooted in the Catholic context (once again, Carl Schmitt serves as an example). Yet do we not already possess, within Chinese normativities and the legacy of Confucianism, our own genealogies of “pastoral care” and “governance”? Chinese legal historians are not writing for the past; they are writing for China’s own blueprint of virtue-based rule.
For this reason, legal historians cannot be satisfied with the study of imperial legal codes, pre-modern property institutions, or immersion in the administrative institutions of the Qing empire. The greater the temporal distance between China and its past, the heavier the burden of tradition becomes. It is therefore necessary to draw the past closer—or even to rewrite it—in order to transcend tradition and enable legal history to participate in contemporary debates on normativities in China. The key criterion in researching Chinese legal traditions is not historical-scientific accuracy as such, but the degree to which they respond to the Zeitgeist. A few examples from the academic publications in 2025 are illustrative enough: one argues that Chinese forms of “belief in the law” are more resilient than Western, Christianity-based legal faith (Sun, 2025); another explores how Confucius’ views on “non-litigation” might resolve international disputes (He, 2025); and yet another expresses firm confidence that “the temporalisation of classical Chinese legal thought and the sinicisation of Western jurisprudence” will globalise Chinese legal scholarship (Yu, 2025).
Faced with Western modernity, the question for Chinese legal history was how it could help shape China’s own modernity without remaining subject to the conceptual authority of the West. The phrase “form our own system and build our own glory” has now been smoothly translated into the state project of building an “independent knowledge system.” Liu Haibo, in turn, has become an intellectual symbol for quite a few legal historians.
This is what distinguishes the current movement from its predecessors. Earlier legal history remained attached to the Confucian tradition and tended to conceal the Western origins of its theories. The new legal history, by contrast, makes no attempt to hide those Western origins. It is precisely this origin that guides the Exodus beyond the West and towards service to the messianic destination of a new China. The more cautious may content themselves with repeating Xi Jinping’s encouragement that “the best inheritance of history is to create a new history, and the greatest respect for human civilization is to create a new form of human civilization.” Some of the more radical voices, however, come close to echoing Carl Schmitt’s famous proclamation: “We are on the side of the things to come!” (Wir sind auf der Seite der kommenden Dinge!) (Schmitt, 1934).
The Rest is Legal History
From the turbulent new developments in Chinese legal scholarship, we can observe the powerful energy of using history in law. The ambitions of legal historians are one thing, of course. For the vast majority of them, the most pressing task remains securing a place in an intensely competitive career and publishing environment. After all, in this grand drama of “building the independent knowledge system”, legal history is not the only chorus.
At the same time, there is no doubt that the growing confidence of Chinese legal historians has also provided considerable stimulus and important insights. This is especially true because many of these ideas, although drawn from Western legal traditions, have been stripped of the typical old European bonne conscience and thus can be used in a rather plain and direct way. When Chinese legal scholars no longer regard the West as the “Vatican,” and no longer see the chair professors sitting in the Western universities as “cardinals,” local and vivid Chinese normative vocabularies can instead enter into dialogue with the Western legal terms that were, after all, once equally vivid.
It may therefore still be undecided whether Chinese legal history is moving towards conservatism or innovation. As a Chinese legal historian, I must continue to ask myself and also look for answers from my Chinese colleagues: Does using Chinese legal history in law mean uncovering what has been obscured, recovering what has been suppressed, and exploring the possibilities offered by historical China? Or does it risk becoming a force of suppression itself, allowing legal history to settle for amplifying the existing order and turning its practitioners into priests of a cult of history?
We Chinese legal historians, after all, are based in law schools, and we tend to favour synchronic perspectives. Whether dealing with the statutes of imperial China, the constitutional movements of the Republican period, or contemporary Zhengfa (政法) traditions, legal historians occupy a privileged position. We dare to lay these elements out side by side and subject them to examination, thereby supplying imagination for contemporary Chinese normativities. As the young Gan Yang once envisaged, “the past here is no longer a rigid and lifeless given, but has become an inexhaustible source of possibilities”. And regardless of how radical the transformation may be, as long as it is a change initiated by Chinese actors themselves, Chinese people remain Chinese (Gan, 1987).
By way of an epilogue, I would like to raise one further question: what relationship exists between the German-language tradition and the current trajectory of Chinese legal history? This is not a question addressed to German-based Sinologists or scholars advocating global history, but rather to the guardians of the Western canon.
A Japanese scholar once remarked, not without resentment, that the post-war Japanese constitution was spiritually akin to the constitutional legacy of the French Revolution, but that long-standing German canonical traditions had severely constrained Japanese jurists’ ability to recognise this possibility (Mizubayashi, 2013).
Returning to the opening anecdote, Roman Herzog may not have been wrong: China did not fully receive Roman law. But this does not mean that Chinese scholars are unfamiliar with Roman law—or with Pax Romana. And German, in those Chinese classrooms where civil law and Roman law are taught, remains a kind of lingua franca.
At a time when classical scholarship to which one is deeply committed is increasingly affected in Europe by movements of “provincialising Europe,” it is certainly gratifying to know that one’s works still find an enthusiastic readership in the “Far East.” Yet when scholars from the German-speaking world actively engage in such exchanges, do they fully grasp the consequences to which their theories may lead? Do they recognise how much unrealised potential still lies dormant within the theories they represent, in the longue durée of human history?
Do you see? A spectre is haunting East Asia—the spectre of Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger.
References
GAN, Yang (甘阳). “The Conflict over the Ancient and the Modern, China and the West” [“古今中西之争”]. Originally titled “Several Questions in the Cultural Debates of the 1980s” [“八十年代文化讨论的几个问题”], and written in autumn 1985, first published in full in Culture: China and the World [文化：中国与世界], vol. 1. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, June 1987.
GAN, Yang (甘阳).“The New-Era ‘Unification of the Three Traditions’: The Fusion of Three Traditions and the Revival of Chinese Civilisation” [“新时代的‘通三统’——三种传统的融会与中华文明的复兴”]. Book Town [书城], no. 7 (2005).
HE, Hairen (贺海仁). “On Non-Litigation Civilization” [“论无讼文明”]. Political Science and Law [政治与法律] , no. 2 (2025).
JIANG, Shigong (强世功). “China’s Path and Model of Rule of Law: A Global Perspective and Chinese Experience” [“中国法治道路与法治模式——全球视野与中国经验”] Administrative Reform [行政管理改革], no. 8 (2019).
JIANG, Shigong (强世功). “How to Think about Zhengfa (Politics and Law)” [“如何思考政法”]. Open Times [开放时代], no. 2 (2024).
LIU, Xiaofeng (刘小枫). “The Heaviness of Lightness and the Lightness of Heaviness: On the Way to the Karl Barth Archive” [“轻之沉重和沉重之轻——去往卡尔·巴特档案馆的路上”]. Dushu [读书], no. 3 (1990)
MIZUBAYASHI, Takeshi (水林彪). “The Modern Prototype of ‘Constitution and Economic Order’ and Its Transformation: The Historical Position of the Constitution of Japan” [“『憲法と経済秩序』の近代的原型とその変容——日本国憲法の歴史的位置”]. Quarterly Review of Corporation and Legal Creation [季刊 企業と法創造] 9, no. 3 (2013).
Schmitt, Carl. “Nationalsozialistisches Rechtsdenken.” Deutsches Recht 4 (1934).
SUN, Kang (孙康). “The Characteristics, Value, and Optimization Path of the Traditional Chinese Law-Abiding Model: A Comparison with the Western Discourse of ‘Belief in Law’” [“中国传统守法模式的特点、价值与优化途径——兼与西方‘法律信仰’话语比较”]. Political Science and Law [政治与法律], no. 2 (2025).
YU, Zhong (喻中). “On the Redrawing of the Global Legal Map” [“论世界法学版图的重绘”]. Science of Law [法律科学], no. 1 (2025).
Cite as: Ku, Haochen: Independent Knowledge System for the People’s Republic? Using Chinese Legal History in Law, legalhistoryinsights.com, 12.05.2026, https://doi.org/10.17176/20260520-104603-0
