Jiang Liu You Sheng: Theoretical and International Law Volume of the Centennial Celebration Collection of the Law School of Peking University

Author: Peking University Law School
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-05-01
Features: This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Peking University Law School, and strictly speaking, it is also the 100th anniversary of the establishment of modern legal education in Peking University—and simultaneously in China. We have compiled this collection of essays from the law school as a commemoration. We should express our gratitude to many teachers for their cooperation, as well as to Teacher Zhao Huan for the extensive editorial work they contributed to this book. The selection of essays required considerable thought. Theoretically, and indeed our intention was, to compile a collection of essays by current and former faculty members of Peking University. However, this task proved to be extremely challenging. First, due to the social upheavals and changes over the past century, many materials are now incomplete. Second, over the past century, there have been significant personnel changes among faculty members, as well as multiple mergers and splits of institutions. As a result, it has been difficult to determine who was or was not a faculty member of Peking University, and in some cases, even unavoidable omissions have occurred. Third, even if these were not issues, it would have been challenging to determine whether a paper was written by an author while they were teaching at Peking University. If we abandoned or relaxed this criterion, we might have had to include the works of law teachers from law schools across the country, as well as lawyers, judges, and prosecutors. This would not only be impossible for a commemorative collection but might also lead some to criticize the Peking University Law School today for "raising a banner to hide one's true intentions."
Fourth—and most importantly—it is essential to gather some of the best and most significant essays, whether in terms of academic or social significance, to reflect the 100-year history of the Peking University Law School (Department). However, this is not just difficult but particularly so, because "important" and "good" are relative to the era, context, and the development of the discipline at the time, rather than being absolute or purely qualitative. Law, as a discipline that places greater emphasis on practice, not only has numerous sub-disciplines but also, to this day, lacks a fundamentally stable academic paradigm that can be used to uniformly evaluate legal scholarship, unlike natural sciences or social sciences such as economics.
Given this, we adopted a relatively pragmatic and less labor-intensive approach to the selection. Essentially, we asked each faculty member who had held a long-term position in the Peking University Law Department or Law School after the Cultural Revolution to submit one of their best papers. Even so, there were still many challenges. For example, how to select papers from some elderly professors who have passed away? And how to include the works of former faculty members who once taught at the Peking University Law Department but later left? Additionally, there were other minor technical issues.
Nevertheless, we completed the selection of this commemorative collection, though it inevitably has its shortcomings and imperfections. Looking at the bigger picture, the problems mentioned above are actually related to China's modernization and rule-of-law issues over the past century. For instance, why do we need to define the boundaries of selection? This question itself presupposes the boundaries of a community (even if it is an academic one) and the principle of equality before the law. The difficulty in determining these boundaries is, to some extent, due to the high mobility of people in modern society. And the challenge of judging the academic and social significance of papers, apart from other factors, is partly linked to China's social and intellectual transformations, the changes and development of academic traditions (academic diversification or heterogeneity), and the pluralization of academic evaluation standards.
In a traditional (and therefore highly "static") society, whether the community or the composition of its members, whether academic traditions or academic evaluation standards, would be highly stable and relatively uniform. In such a society, these "challenges" might not even exist. The development of our society over the past century means we must accept the "challenges" brought by social change. Moreover, these challenges also, to some extent, signify the progress of Chinese society and the development of Chinese law.
In this sense, this collection is more of a symbol or a representation than an attempt to fully or completely showcase the history or main trends of Peking University's 100-year legal development. It primarily reflects the academic changes in the Peking University Law School (Department) over the past two decades, particularly since the 1990s. In fact, it was not until the 1990s that law in China began to enter a stable and relatively comprehensive period of development, alongside the growth of China's socialist market economy, the comprehensive reform and opening-up, and the full development of law as a profession. The lessons from this period are worth reflecting upon.
From the modest beginnings of establishing the law department at Peking University to the current flourishing development of Chinese rule of law and legal studies, this has been a challenging journey. The murmurs of streams are no longer heard, nor the roars of gorges. But from the seemingly somber sound of the river crashing against the shore as it flows eastward, from its calm and steady rhythm, we seem to sense its current confidence, resilience, and strength.
Su Li
March 20, 2004
At the Peking University Law School