IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cid/wpfacu/47a.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

A Trojan Horse Behind Chinese Walls?: Problems and Prospects of US-Sponsored "Rule of Law" Reform Projects in the People's Republic of China

Author

Listed:
  • Matthew C. Stephenson

Abstract

The US government has announced an initiative to promote the "rule of law" in the People's Republic of China. However, though China has also endorsed building the "rule of law" as a goal, the American and Chinese views of what "rule of law" entails differ substantially. In the US government, rule of law reform is seen as a way to promote human rights and political reform, whereas the Chinese government wants to restrict law reform to those areas closely related to developing a market economy. To deal with this divergence in goals, the US has adopted a "Trojan Horse" strategy: the belief is that the Chinese will allow US-sponsored law reform programs for economic reasons, but once established, these programs will lead to broader political reform. However, this view is not well-supported by theory or empirical evidence. Thus, while law reform programs in China may be worthwhile, we should be skeptical of their ability to trigger more fundamental political reform.

Suggested Citation

  • Matthew C. Stephenson, 2000. "A Trojan Horse Behind Chinese Walls?: Problems and Prospects of US-Sponsored "Rule of Law" Reform Projects in the People's Republic of China," CID Working Papers 47A, Center for International Development at Harvard University.
    • Handle: RePEc:cid:wpfacu:47a
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/cid/files/publications/faculty-working-papers/047.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Thrainn Eggertsson, 2006. "On the survival of imperfect institutions," Revista de Analisis Economico – Economic Analysis Review, Universidad Alberto Hurtado/School of Economics and Business, vol. 21(2), pages 13-24, December.
    2. Ogus, Anthony, 2005. "Towards Appropriate Institutional Arrangements for Regulation in Less Developed Countries," Centre on Regulation and Competition (CRC) Working papers 30644, University of Manchester, Institute for Development Policy and Management (IDPM).
    3. Ogus, Anthony, 2004. "The Importance of Legal Infrastructure for Regulation (and Deregulation) in Developing Countries," Centre on Regulation and Competition (CRC) Working papers 30603, University of Manchester, Institute for Development Policy and Management (IDPM).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    rule of law; China; legal reform; political reform;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • K10 - Law and Economics - - Basic Areas of Law - - - General (Constitutional Law)
    • K20 - Law and Economics - - Regulation and Business Law - - - General
    • K30 - Law and Economics - - Other Substantive Areas of Law - - - General
    • K40 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cid:wpfacu:47a. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chuck McKenney (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ciharus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.