Melbourne Law School - Research Publications
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ItemOf Ceremonial Columns(Cambridge University Press, 2017)
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ItemFraming the Stability Imperative(Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, 2014)The studies in this volume make apparent the activist disposition of China’s legal institutions in the era of Harmonious Society and Stability Maintenance. This disposition has enabled the Party-state to legitimize important changes in the practices and policies of courts, governments and security organs on the basis of a certain political narrative about the imperative of social stability. Political narrative, expressed particularly through Harmonious Society and Stability Maintenance discourse, has enabled the Party-state to reframe and reformulate justice and security practices to accommodate its place in leading the country through uncertain times of social upheaval that accompanies rapid economic growth.
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ItemManagement of Stability in Labour Relations(Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, 2014)Workers occupy a central position in the ideology of the socialist state. In theory they continue to occupy the position of ‘masters’ of the country. They enjoy a range of constitutionally protected labour rights such as the right and duty to work, the right to rest, freedom of association, procession and demonstration, the right to rest and to receive material assistance from the state and society when they are old, ill, or disabled. Women and men enjoy equal rights. Workers’ rights are defined and given specific form by legislation and to a great extent are dependent upon state action for their fulfillment. Private enforcement mechanisms exist, but in important respects are of limited scope and ineffective to pressure for broader structural changes in either economic policy or the labour market.
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ItemStability and the Law(Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, 2014)This book is about judicial and governmental activism around the issue of managing social instability in China today. The studies in this volume examine the relationship between law and politics and observe how the stability imperative shapes this interaction.
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ItemOpportunities and Challenges for Legislative and Institutional Reform of Detention in China(Routledge, 2016)Throughout this volume, we have used the word ‘reform’ to refer to the changes to legislation governing deprivation of liberty in contemporary China, as well as to the institutions responsible for enforcing such legislation. As many other words do, ‘reform’ carries two distinct connotations, which depend on the ideological and cultural context of the speaker. For most western scholars who are active in the field of China studies, the word ‘reform’ conjures up the idea of a teleological march from Marxism to liberal modernity. This connotation is absent from the word ‘gaige’, the Chinese original for ‘reform’ which lacks such a directional element. Because of this, ‘reform’ is a term all those who, in China, write or speak about detention often want to use cautiously, as it belongs to two distinct universes of meaning at the same time.
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ItemDeprivation of Liberty Under Scrutiny(Routledge, 2016)Since the early 1980s, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has embarked on a dramatic and on–going experiment with legal and institutional reform (gaige). The aim has been the creation of an efficient and modern justice system, responsive to social and economic change and proactive in protecting the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) hold on political power. This has meant that over approximately three decades, the topic of reform has also served as the thematic cornerstone of academic analyses in the field of Chinese law and justice.
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ItemWhat to Make of the Abolition of Re-Education Through Labour?(Routledge, 2016)In 1979 two of the first laws to be passed in the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) era of reform and opening up were the Criminal Law (Xing Fa) and the Criminal Procedure Law (Xingshi Susong Fa) 1979. Whilst a number of legislative instruments had been in place prior to 1979 that authorised arrest and criminal punishment, this was the first time in the history of the PRC that comprehensive codes of criminal law and procedure had been passed. Of course, the lack of legislation had not prevented the dispensation of criminal justice.
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ItemJustice at the Margins: Notions of Justice in the Punishment of Prostitution(Cambridge University Press, 2017)This chapter uses a close analysis of the legal treatment of the first-party prostitution transaction (sex workers and their clients) to tease out the official vision(s) of justice embedded in both text and practice. I have chosen to look at notions of justice as they apply to prostitution as this conduct is unlawful and is seen by the authorities as seriously harming social order and undermining socialist morality. And, since the test of a state’s commitment to legal justice is found in its treatment of the morally and socially marginalised, the chapter goes on to juxtapose the legalistic vision of justice with the periodic public humiliation of sex workers.
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ItemThe Expression of Justice in China(Cambridge University Press, 2017)Claims about a strident pursuit of justice weave through all of China’s modern history. Intellectual, political and social ferment that exploded on to China’s political stage on 4 May 1919 was motivated by a common will among the intellectual and political class to find a proper place for China among the family of nations. Pursuit of justice underpinned this movement, as it did the establishment of the Republic of China (ROC) eight years earlier. Communism was cultivated in China in the 1920s replete with a political vocabulary that was indebted to liberal and democratic political philosophies as much as it was to communist ideology. Here too, it was the ideal of attaining justice for the populace that prompted popular reaction to the inequalities, corruption and violence endemic in the ROC from the 1920s to the 1940s. This quest drove the civil war and the foundation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. Over the course of the revolutionary era in the 1930s and 1940s, ideas put forward by some leading theorists and activists of the Chinese Communist Party advocating for a more democratic-liberal socialism were suppressed and eventually wiped out, while Maoist discourse became progressively privileged.
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ItemStructuring China's Engagement with International Human Rights: The Case of Wage Protection Law and Practice(Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, 2017)This year marks the 10th anniversary of China’s accession to the WTO. That period has seen dramatic reforms in China’s economy and increases in the breadth and depth of China’s engagement with the international trading order. Many have given a positive evaluation of China’s engagement with the international trading regime, in particular citing a high level of responsiveness to rulings of the dispute resolution panel decisions (Harpaz). Yet in some areas, China seems to have resisted and even rebuffed international norms and conventions.