This editorial essay maps the six trajectories of Chinese law presented in this special issue, introducing their key arguments and working out common themes. One such common theme is the importance of Orientalism as an analytical framework for the study of Chinese law. The essay suggests that despite recent advances, including those reflected in this issue, the theory of (legal) Orientalism is still not sufficiently complex for it to avoid defeating itself. Missing, in particular, is a theoretical understanding of Oriental, or more generally, cultural stereotypes, which seeks to answer the question: At what point does our speaking of something turn into a stereotype that distorts its true nature? The essay outlines an answer by drawing on Hegel and then restates Said’s core thesis that the Orientalist bypasses the “real” Orient and reduces it to a mere stereotype of his own imagination. The restatement of Orientalism in this more robust theoretical framework shows that Said was right and wrong – in an important way.

In 2016, Teemu Ruskola's book Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law was published in translation in China. This essay analyzes the Chinese reception of this book. Originally addressed to a North Atlantic readership, Legal Orientalism examines critically the asymmetric relationship in which Euro-American law and Chinese law stand to one another, the former regarding itself as an embodiment of universal values while viewing the latter's as culturally particular ones. The essay explores what happens when a “Western” work of self-criticism is transmitted to an “Eastern” audience. In this context, it analyzes the politics of self-Orientalism, Oriental legalism, and the comparative method.

“Legal Orientalism” is a critical theory, which aims to criticize and deconstruct the “universalism” constructed by the Western legal discourse and restore its locality and relativity. While denying that the East has a politico-legal tradition different from that of the West and treating the East as an object to be colonized and baptized, the West has lost the ability to improve its own politico-legal civilizations through equal dialogue among civilizations. For Chinese legal scholars, the significance of legal Orientalism’s critical perspective is not to allow us to expose the “hypocrisy of Western law” with the theoretical weapons provided by Western scholars, but to help us getting rid of the predicament of “self-Orientalism”, with an open and confident attitude to construct a legal discourse that embodies the equal subjectivity of all civilizations.

Legal Orientalism has two histories. One is the Orientalist statements that we find scattered through-out Western modernity, which involve imaginations of Chinese legal consciousness in particular. The other is the history of the concept of legal Orientalism itself: how this concept is understood, used, and commented upon. Taking Hegel's philosophy as its entry and exit point to legal Orientalism, this article works out the importance of reflecting on both of these histories. Such reflection contributes to avoiding that the histories of legal Orientalism hinder cross-cultural communication between "Orient" and "Occident" and to enabling comparative legal learning. Against this backcloth, the article suggests that thinking about legal Orientalism should be complemented by the concepts of dialogue and Oriental legalism.

Although postcolonial studies have prospered in the field of culture, they are still relatively new to the field of law, the field of Chinese legal theory in particular. In his monograph Legal Orientalism, Teemu Ruskola has introduced the postcolonial concept of Orientalism to legal studies. The article suggests that his theory is of great assistance to rethink and break through the powerful Western narrative and concept of law, to develop a more pluralistic legal culture and to further the subjectivity of Chinese legal thinking. However, the overzealous emphasis on Legal Orientalism in China might easily lead to nationalism, cultural conservatism and an exaggeration of the cultural hegemony of the West, creating yet another kind of non-rational academic bias. The insights of Legal Orientalism are important, but the ongoing search for a Chinese legal subjectivity must be based on a constructive dialogue between the East and the West.

Comparative lawyers have traditionally felt compelled to assert the utility of their craft for improving legal scholarship and innovation. Yet, these humanistic and functional arguments often forget the deleterious effects that legal comparisons can have when appropriated by various actors who are uninterested in legal self-reflection or improvement but instead seek to suppress domestic critiques. Such suppression is enacted by delegitimizing domestic critiques through contrasting negative aspects of foreign legal practice with idealizations of domestic law. This dynamic was classically highlighted in legal anthropologist Laura Nader’s work on the use of cross-cultural legal comparison to attack feminist critiques in both Euro-American and Islamic societies. This potential “dark side” of comparative law is increasingly at play in the rise of global authoritarianism and democratic backsliding. The pervasiveness of this “dark side” has in part been obscured by the continued use of old geographical proxies such as “the West” or “Orientalism” to stand-in for the dangers of legal comparison in cross-cultural contexts. The Sino-American relationship, in particular, highlights how the use of these geographical short-hands blunts proper focus on the evolving global power dynamics in which cross-cultural representations are made by authoritarian interests. A focus on power over geography, moving beyond asserting new geographical proxies such as “the Global South” or “Occidentalism,” is both analytically necessary and ethically demanded to help circumvent such authoritarian abuse. While rigorous comparative legal methods may in fact be salutary for understanding and improving modern law, it is incumbent on comparative lawyers to remain cognizant of how this potential “dark side” acts to repress domestic critiques even as they may conceive of their work as transcending traditional critiques of ethnocentrism.

Traditionally, civil law has been viewed as remaining a mere outline or even totally absent in early Chinese law. In this view, civil law constitutes a specifically modern and Western product inappropriate for analyzing the law of ancient Chinese dynasties. This point of view lives on in most contemporary legal history textbooks. However, already at the turn to the 20th century, some late Imperial and early Republican scholars and practitioners drew on the civil–criminal distinction in order to propose legal reforms, thus initiating the vernacularization of civil law in China. Recently, excavated bamboo slips containing ancient Chinese legal texts cast even more doubt on the supposed lack and scarcity of early Chinese civil law. Zhang Chaoyang’s book The Construction of Early Chinese Civil Law offers methodical tools to theorize these insights and to overcome the flaws of contemporary descriptions of early Chinese civil law: Zhang’s new method of localization analyzes the Chinese vernacularization of civil law by situating this civil law in China’s own ancient legal history, identifying both the substantive principles and formal features of the early legal system. This essay critically discusses Zhang’s thesis and investigates in what respect the ‘early Chinese civil law’ can indeed be called civil and law. It thereby arrives at some methodological guidelines and caveats for the modern researcher of early Chinese civil law.