regards-citoyens

Investigations into China’s law and legal system invariably presume that China’s many regulatory problems are problems of a regulatory laggard—that they are problems that stem from China’s failure to as yet construct a mature legal system, such as those found in the advanced industrial countries of the so-called “West” (particularly that of the United States). This paper argues that this is not necessarily the case. China may actually, in many aspects, be operating at the very forefront of the regulatory horizon, compelled by its location in a distinctly post-Fordist Asian economic world to confront regulatory problems that are just beginning to seep into the still largely “Fordist” West. Many of China’s regulatory problems, in other words, may often be those of a regulatory pioneer, not those of a regulatory laggard, in the sense that many of its regulatory problems are likely to be problems of the post-Fordist world into which we are moving, rather than problems of the Fordist world from which our present regulatory understandings are derived.

Michael W. Dowdle is a visiting associate professor of law at the National University of Singapore. He was formerly the inaugural holder of the China in Globalization and Governance at Sciences Po, and Himalayas Foundation Distinguished Visiting Professor in Comparative Law at Tsinghua University. His publications include Public Accountability: Designs, Dilemmas and Experiences (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Building Constitutionalism in China (PalgraveMacmillan, 2009) (with Stéphanie Balme). His present work looks at how transnational economic and human geography affect domestic regulatory capacity.

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