Category: Library

Samuli Seppänen,  assistant professor at the Faculty of Law of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, donated his latest book: “Ideological Conflict and the Rule of Law in Contemporary China” (Cambridge University Press, 2016) to our library collection. We are thankful for this contribution, which will certainly be of great support to students and researchers in understanding rule of law with Chinese characteristics.

Ideological Conflict and the Rule of Law in Contemporary China studies ideological divisions within Chinese legal academia and their relationship to arguments about the rule of law. The book describes argumentative strategies used by Chinese legal scholars to legitimize and subvert China’s state-sanctioned ideology. It also examines Chinese efforts to invent new, alternative rule of law conceptions. In addition to this descriptive project, the book advances a more general argument about the rule of law phenomenon, insisting that many arguments about the rule of law are better understood in terms of their intended and actual effects rather than as analytic propositions or descriptive statements. To illustrate this argument, the book demonstrates that various paradoxical, contradictory and otherwise implausible arguments about the rule of law play an important role in Chinese debates about the rule of law. Paradoxical statements about the rule of law, in particular, can be useful for an ideological project.

At the occasion of his visit to Helsinki, Professor Shen Wei  has donated to the Center’s library his newest book “Corporate Law in China: Structure, Governance and Regulation“.

This title provides a comprehensive and critical study of China’s corporate law regime, as Prof. Shen examines the latest 2013 amendments to the PRC Company Law. Many consider this amendment to be a milestone in China’s quest for an eventual consolidation of one single corporate law regime, applicable to both domestic entities and foreign invested enterprises.

The book is now available for consultation at the Kaisa-talo Library, where the China Law Center collection is located.

Professor Shen Wei is the KoGuan Chair Professor of Law and Special Oriental Scholar Professor of Law at Shanghai Jiao Tong University KoGuan Law School. Professor Shen’s current research interests include international investment law, corporate governance, financial regulation, and international commercial arbitration.

In the fall 2014, the China Law Center collection has been established as a separate section at the Kaisa-talo library in Helsinki. Ms. Liu Ying, a student in the International Business Law master program at the Faculty of Law (University of Helsinki), said that this collection has been already very helpful in her studies. As she is undertaking a comparative research on the identification of the relevant market in EU and Chinese competition law, she has found relevant textbooks that helped her to understand the legal background for her master thesis. She was surprised to find in Finland books that she used for her law studies in China and she would have never imagine that she could have such an easy access to Chinese legal materials thousands of kilometers away from home. Additionally, ‘the collection counts not only textbooks written by leading Chinese professors, but there is also the most famous Chinese legal novel Mutui Zhengyi’ Ms. Liu said.

The collection is based on book donations made by CASS Institute of Law and the CASS Law Library as well as Peking University Law School and Fudan University Law School. It offers about 400 titles on specific fields of Chinese law as well as contributions on the methodology of comparative legal research, in both Chinese and English. The books can be consulted only at the Kaisa-talo library, but researchers and students from Member Institutions can freely request inter-library loans.  As we seek to keep the collection growing we regularly exchange materials with partners in China. We invite you therefore to browse the Helka catalogue by using the collection call number “hc 4. krs oikeustiede china law center collection” to find the available titles.