Chinese Law Research Articles

A Preliminary Study on the Influence of Buddhism on Traditional Chinese Legal Thought

Since its eastward spread, Buddhism has interacted with and integrated into traditional Chinese culture, gradually becoming localized and sinicized, flourishing during the Sui and Tang dynasties. The Buddhist doctrines and precepts, such as the concepts of equality of all beings, compassion, the notion of hell, and karma, have increasingly influenced traditional Chinese legal thought. These ideas have altered or reinforced the legislative, law enforcement, judicial, and law-abiding perspectives of emperors, officials, and even the common people. The introduction of Buddhism brought new legal concepts, enriched the cultural connotation of Chinese law, and contributed to the formation of China's unique legal philosophy.

A Study of China's Cross-Border Data System and Compliance of Multinational Enterprises in China

In the era of digital economy, states pay more attention to data as it is the key factor of economic development. And they have also made different actions to regulate cross-border data flow. Nowadays, due to the Chinas rapidly growing digital economy, more and more multinational enterprises are choosing to invest in China. Through evaluating multinational cross-border data regulatory system and focusing on the current status of China's cross-border data system, this essay summarizes China's laws and regulations about data supervision. On this basis, this essay provides specific data compliance advice for multinational enterprises operating in China. In order to better adapt to Chinese regulatory environment, companies should accurately understand data outbound security assessment mechanism and data localization principle stipulated by Chinese law. By establishing data classification and grading the management system, regular audit and risk assessment mechanism, and employee compliance training system, the enterprise can achieve both the digital trade business growth and cross-border data security compliance.

Legal Study on Marriage Rights of Homosexuals in China

The issue of equality related to homosexuality has always been a hot spot in anti-discrimination. Through years of legal and cultural changes, the equal rights of homosexuals in China have been guaranteed to some extent. However, gay people in China have not been fully treated fairly, especially when it comes to marriage rights. Article 2 of the Marriage Act only regulates heterosexual marriage and does not cover same-sex marriage. This paper explores the legal status and challenges surrounding the marriage rights of homosexuals in China. By examining current legislation, judicial cases, and societal perspectives, the study identifies the legal barriers faced by the LGBTQ+ community in achieving marriage equality. Given that Chinese law currently does not recognize same-sex marriages, this research seeks to highlight the need for legal reforms to ensure equal treatment of homosexuals in marriage laws. The paper also proposes legal amendments, improved law enforcement, and societal education to foster greater inclusivity and fairness in China.

A Steep Road to Improve the Accountability of the Credit Rating Industry: the Chinese Way or the Western Way?

AbstractRegulators in the US, EU and China embarked on several episodes of reforms to improve the accountability of credit rating agencies after the Financial Crisis 2007–2008. The US reform implemented a new civil liability provision, although the new regime remains weak, largely caused by the regulator’s inability in taking a tough liability approach on powerful credit rating agencies but giving in to the economic demands of the country. In contrast, the EU’s provision is much more balanced; however, it left too much leeway to the national laws’ interpretation. The parameters of civil liability under the Chinese law largely coincide with the Western laws, although with a unique robustness by reversing the burden of proof. The recent reforms improved the accountability of credit rating agencies to some extent, nonetheless, more work is needed to give effect to these regulatory reforms with further collaboration. This paper critically analyses the robustness of the Chinese civil liability regime with the reversed burden of proof, which arguably sits uncomfortably with the Western laws. It calls for an improvement of the current civil liability regime in the US and China by adopting the EU model, which is more feasible to balance the responsibilities of key players in the financial market.

CLegal-QA: a Chinese legal question answering with natural language generation methods

Legal question answering (Legal QA) aims to provide accurate and timely answers to legal questions, significantly reducing the workload of legal professionals. This approach improves the efficiency of the judiciary and ensures prompt, professional legal assistance to the public. Currently, a major challenge is the absence of a large-scale dataset tailored for Chinese generative legal question answering. To address this, our study developed a comprehensive automatic question answering dataset for Chinese civil law, named cLegal-QA, which comprises 14,000 high-frequency questions from Chinese legal communities. This dataset spans various legal disputes and includes questions, disputes, scenarios, multiple lawyer responses, and gold-standard answers from human annotators. Additionally, we employed a generative QA model specifically designed for the cLegal-QA dataset. The results indicate that fully-supervised models, notably UniLM, T5, and BART, substantially outperform zero-shot models on this dataset, with ChatYuan being the most effective among the zero-shot models. Our analysis also reveals that answers labeled with 60–80% accuracy yield the highest efficiency. Furthermore, we evaluated the real-world performance of these models with expert validation and applied transfer learning to new civil disputes. While the QA models demonstrate commendable performance on the dataset, there is still potential for further improvement.

“Human rights” in the protection of rural women’s land rights and interests in China, 2000–2022: judicial perspective

In mainland China, rural women still suffer from unequal treatment in the distribution of land rights and interests. On the conceptual level, the distribution of land rights in China’s rural areas is often characterized by gender-based discrimination. On the institutional level, although Chinese law clearly stipulates that “women and men enjoy equal rights”, it makes no corresponding provision for issues concerning the land rights and interests of women who have changed their place of residence due to marriage. In the case of a conflict between law and custom, justice is the ultimate means to resolve the conflict. According to civil judicial judgment documents (CJJDs) in China Judgment Online, the term “human rights” frequently appears in cases of rural women’s land rights and interests (RWLRIs), which has positive effects on the judicial protection of RWLRIs. “Human rights” shows a relatively concentrated trend in time-based distribution and geographical distribution, respectively. Moreover, “human rights” appears both in the claims of litigants and in the reason of judgment decision-making of judges. The use of “human rights” by judges in their reasons for judgment decision-making reflects the role of “human rights” in interpreting ambiguous rules in judicial activities. Additionally, the use of “human rights” in CJJDs involving RWLRIs reflects at least three human rights concepts. Although using the term “human rights” provides a “program” for protecting RWLRIs in mainland China, it is not enough to rely solely on judges to use “human rights” to protect women’s rights. Only by clarifying the legal norms can we effectively help rural Chinese women get out of their plight.

China’s regulations on the attribution of AI-generated content: an exploration based on the open-ended approach

Abstract This article examines the issue of copyright ownership for AI-generated content under China’s current copyright law, with a particular focus on the open-ended classification system introduced by the 2020 Copyright Law amendment and its practical implications. This amendment marks a shift in Chinese copyright law from a closed-list approach to an open-ended approach, thereby extending copyright protection to non-traditional works, such as AI-generated content. Despite including catch-all provisions and refining the criteria for work classification, ambiguities persist regarding the requirements for originality and the categorical hierarchy, continuing to fuel debates on the copyrightability of AI-generated content. This article analyses representative copyright dispute cases involving AI-generated content to illustrate the adjudicative stance of Chinese courts. Significant differences exist among courts regarding standards for originality and intellectual achievement, with rulings often heavily reliant on individual judges’ interpretations of technology and the creative process, which results in considerable discretion. Additionally, the ambiguous relationship between traditional work categories and catch-all provisions facilitates the classification of AI-generated content as a new type of work, potentially leading to an undue expansion of copyright protection. This article offers recommendations from both legislative and judicial perspectives, proposing the establishment of a ‘priority application for traditional work categories’ principle in legislation, issuing judicial interpretations to clarify AI’s instrumental role in creation and advocating for a cautious and substantive assessment in court to determine whether AI-generated content meets the characteristics of a protected work.

Principles of Standardized Diagnosis and Treatment of Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors (ICIs) and Analysis of Legal Liability for Treatment-Related Tumor Hyperprogression (HPD) Under Chinese Law

Immunotherapy, led by immune checkpoint inhibitors, has reshaped the landscape of tumor treatment, achieving long-acting drug responses in some patients with advanced malignancies, but not all patients can benefit from immunotherapy. In addition to primary drug-resistant patients, we cannot ignore hyperprogressive patients whose disease is accelerated instead after the use of immune checkpoint inhibitors, which are rare but often have a very poor prognosis and are prone to disputes. The mechanism of hyperprogression is still unknown, but not unknown, and some genetic mutations and biomarkers have been shown to be associated with a higher risk of hyperprogression. Clinicians should stratify patients with reference to markers and risk mutations to screen effective patients and inform them of the corresponding risks of immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy to ensure that patients make a fully informed choice of immunotherapy. Comply with evidence-based medical guidelines, standardize the use of medication, and timely monitor and intervene in related adverse events and hyperprogression. Under Chinese law, violation of the principles of diagnosis and treatment is subject to liability, except for those caused by the patient himself, such as backline treatment and sympathetic drug administration.

News Laundering, Paywall, Quality Reporting, and the Copyright Law in the Digital China

“News laundering” (xi gao) is an issue concerned by Chinese professional journalists in recent years. It refers to a series of unauthorized practices in appropriating or plagiarizing the published contents or the ideas presented by professional journalists, which is conducted by social media users including opinion leaders, and portal media, who are not authorized with news reporting licenses. From a legal perspective, it is hard to assert that “news laundering” violates Chinese copyright law, as news is not under the protection of the law and no one could monopolize the “facts”. From journalists’ perspective, this is an act of stealing content from the inside of the digital paywall. This conceptual article, by borrowing the scholarship from media and journalism, and law studies, contemplates the complex mechanism of “news laundering” and its implication for the paywall of legacy media and Chinese media systems, providing new insights into the new research field of news laundering under the Chinese context.

Reflection on legal transplantation theories: a socio-legal historical study of the formulation and evolution of Chinese marine insurance law

Abstract This paper offers a socio-legal historical analysis of the process of formulation and evolution of Chinese marine insurance law by transplanting foreign laws, with a view to grasping from the material of legal history and social reality the deeper significance of the imported law’s relation to tradition, ideology and environmental context. The key argument is that this perspective reveals how transplanted law emerges as an authorless product shaped by social forces and processes. It is created by the operation of institutional arrangements of law-making, which provide the platform for the interplay of diverse traditions and interests generated by the social environment of the importing jurisdiction. This research integrates several lines of discussion of legal transplantation that lack connection, highlights the impact of the transplanting process and contributes to current theoretical debates by proposing potential interdisciplinary research for future studies of legal transplantation.

Conformity of goods and transfer of risk in the international sales of goods: analysis under the rules of the CISG, Chinese law, and United Arab Emirates law

Abstract This article examines the relationship between the conformity of goods and risk transfer under the Civil Code of China, the UAE Civil Transactions Law, and the 1980 United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG). The findings presented in this article consolidate the requirements of conformity of goods in the context of risk transfer between contracting parties and point out the variation between these legal documents in terms of the interpretation of the conformity of goods concept, which would play an influential role in the operation of the passing of risk. Furthermore, recommendations are offered for legislators in China and the United Arab Emirates to bridge the gap between their approaches and the international approach outlined in the CISG regarding the interpretation of the requirement of goods’ conformity in the context of risk transfer. These recommendations align with the international principle of harmonizing and unifying international commercial rules concerning risk transfer in international sale of goods contracts.

Exclusionary Rule of Illegal Evidence Under China’s Criminal Procedure Law and Recommendations for Vietnam

Abstract The exclusion of evidence aims to protect individuals from illegal evidence-collection activities of competent authorities, thereby protecting their legitimate rights and interests. In the judicial reform in recent years in China, the exclusion of evidence has gained great attention from experts, lawmakers, and authorities. This paper explores the process of making and developing the Chinese criminal procedure law on evidence exclusion. On that basis, the author compares and proposes recommendations to enhance Vietnamese criminal procedure law on relevant issues.

The Implementation of the Supported Decision-Making System in Chinese Law

Abstract: This study explores the introduction and realization path of assisted decision system in Chinese law. As the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and other international conventions pay more and more attention to the decision on assistance, China has gradually introduced the system and is facing many challenges, including legal framework and social resources. This paper compares assisted decision with traditional alternative decision, and analyzes its advantages and limitations. Then, it focuses on the practice path of the assisted decision system in China, including how to deal with legal defects, cultural barriers and UN recommendations to China. Finally, this paper looks forward to the possible development direction of the system in the future, and emphasizes the importance of improving legal protection and social support.

Analysis of the Reasons for Vicarious Liability in TortFrom the Perspective of Economics

Abstract: There is no word for "Vicarious Liability" in Chinese law, but as an important concept in the common law system and a common situation in civil law, this article explains the reason and rationality of the establishment of Vicarious Liability from the perspective of economics. This paper explains the benefits of applying the principle of strict liability by applying the Hand formula and the minimum cost principle. To be sure, Vicarious Liability greatly reduces the cost of private transactions, which is conducive to the circulation of the market and the development of the society. Research methods involved in the paper: literature analysis, and case analysis. The study finds that although Vicarious Liability is criticized by some branch theory in the law system, it still has the rationality and necessity of its existence. The importance of vicarious liability can be found especially in the field of employment relationships and in the minor infringement.

Discoursing Chinese Maritime Law’s structure and reform

Abstract China’s role in the international maritime transport industry is undeniably growing: the country has become the second-largest ship-owning nation, its maritime ports are ranked among the top globally, and its national maritime transport company, COSCO Group, is ranked 4th among major shipping companies. However, its current legal framework is behind the commercial practices of the maritime transport industry and its operators. With both the evolution of China’s position on the global stage and the emergence of new judicial maritime practices, a revision was inevitable, particularly as China aims to build itself into a maritime power. Although the revision of the Maritime Law was included in the 13th National People’s Congress agenda for the period from 2018 to 2023, the revised Law has not yet been promulgated but is expected in near future. While the reform project focuses solely on the Chinese Maritime Law, China’s new ambitions could turn this moment into an opportunity to overhaul and rethink the role of Chinese maritime law in the current global context. Whether by modernizing its maritime law while maintaining its existing structure, or by rethinking its entire approach, China should consider the legal experience of current maritime powers, such as France, which could serve as a valuable source of inspiration for Chinese legislature in the future.

Zhang Wanhong (张万红), 1976-2024

Amicus Curiae is pleased to republish below a memorial note commemorating the life and work of the very distinguished Chinese legal scholar Professor Zhang Wanhong, of Wuhan University. Professor Zhang passed away earlier this year. The note came to our attention in The China Collection (formerly Chinese Law Prof Blog) an important forum for posting news and other materials on China’ s legal development. We thank the authors for kindly giving Amicus Curiae permission to republish the commemorative note.

Налоговое право КНР на современном этапе и налоговые вызовы платформенной экономики

The article focuses on the select issues of modern tax law of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The author starts with definition of the key features of Chinese tax law that must be taken into account when analysing it. In particular, the author shows relationship between tax reform and general economic reform, explains how several tax systems co-exist within one state, and gives brief description of the tax system of mainland China. The second part of the article presents in detail the system of legal regulation of taxation in the PRC and reflects the trends in its development. To enhance a better understanding of the features of the legal regulation of taxation in China, the author makes comparisons with sources of Russian tax law. The third part of the article gives overview of the taxation of the platform economy in China, including measures of tax support for the digitalisation of the economy.

Forensic bone age assessment of hand and wrist joint MRI images in Chinese han male adolescents based on deep convolutional neural networks.

In Chinese criminal law, the ages of 12, 14, 16, and 18 years old play a significant role in the determination of criminal responsibility. In this study, we developed an epiphyseal grading system based on magnetic resonance image (MRI) of the hand and wrist for the Chinese Han population and explored the feasibility of employing deep learning techniques for bone age assessment based on MRI of the hand and wrist. This study selected 282 Chinese Han Chinese males aged 6.0-21.0 years old. In the course of our study, we proposed a novel deep learning model for extracting and enhancing MRI hand and wrist bone features to enhance the prediction of target MRI hand and wrist bone age and achieve precise classification of the target MRI and regression of bone age. The evaluation metric for the classification model including precision, specificity, sensitivity, and accuracy, while the evaluation metrics chosen for the regression model are MAE. The epiphyseal grading was used as a supervised method, which effectively solved the problem of unbalanced sample distribution, and the two experts showed strong consistency in the epiphyseal plate grading process. In the classification results, the accuracy in distinguishing between adults and minors was 91.1%, and the lowest accuracy in the three minor classifications (12, 14, and 16 years of age) was 94.6%, 91.1% and 96.4%, respectively. The MAE of the regression results was 1.24 years. In conclusion, the deep learning model proposed enabled the age assessment of hand and wrist bones based on MRI.

Constructing the Theoretical System of the Chinese Personality Rights Law

Constructing the Theoretical System of the Chinese Personality Rights Law

Gas-sensitive synergistic effect of Au-decorated ZnO nano-structured materials for rapid ethanol detection based on simulated sunlight activation

Local surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) and noble metal modification/doping are classical methods for improving the performance of metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS)-based gas sensors. However, relatively less attention is paid to their synergies. In particular, research on synergistic gas-sensing technology that combines sunlight activation with other methods is significant for using friendly energy. In this study, Au-decorated ZnO (Au/ZnO) nano-structured materials (NMs) are successfully synthesised using a cost-effective nano-seed-assisted chemical bath and UV irradiation growth methods. The sensor based on this material exhibits superior performance in ethanol vapour under simulated sunlight, maintaining high sensitivity and repeatability at a low optimal working temperature. In particular, the sensitivity to 100 ppm of ethanol is 7.5 times better and the response time is 20 times shorter (tres < 1 s) in simulated sunlight than in the dark environment. The limit of detection (LOD) of ethanol is as low as 97 ppb, which is much lower than the concentration in exhaled breath of driving under the influence of alcohol according to Chinese law (20–80 ppm). This study provides a reliable and ultra-fast ethanol detection method, with potential applications in environmental monitoring and traffic safety. A possible gas-sensitive mechanism of the Au/ZnO ethanol vapour sensor is proposed based on the synergistic effect between simulated sunlight activation (LSPR, humidity resistance and thermal activation) and noble metal modification (electron sensitisation and chemical sensitisation). It provides a promising method for exploring the utilisation of sunlight for rapid gas detection.