By Jerome A. Cohen
Here is an interesting piece from the PRC’s leading international newspaper. I suppose the headline (“Western intellectuals now have weak minds to grasp China's might”) means we have weak minds because we are ill-prepared and lack appropriate means of analysis for what the author confusingly claims is either a new, unprecedented phenomenon or a reworked version of traditional China, in either event a different civilization from that of the “West”. Do we need the late Sam Huntington, Yu Ying-shi and John Fairbank more than ever? Can today’s scholars in China help us avoid the stigma of “historical nihilism” that is applied by the PRC to honest efforts to produce objective scholarship? What concepts need to be developed to describe and analyze the PRC?
Specialists in various fields of China studies, while unwilling to discard those frameworks that have thus far proved helpful in analyzing various societies, including China’s, have sought to adapt to the distinctive challenges the PRC presents in their respective fields. Indeed, it is those challenges that make the study of China so exciting – the opportunity to unearth new facts and to determine the extent to which new ideas and modes of analysis are required to do justice to those facts.
In the field of Chinese law, many of us, going back to the early 1960s when Stanley Lubman, William Jones, Randle Edwards, David Buxbaum, Anthony Dicks, I and others first tried to take up the challenge, we did not attempt to squeeze the Chinese experience into existing comparative categories, although we did not ignore those stimuli. We sought to analyze it for what it appeared to be. Researching and writing my 1968 book on the PRC’s criminal process proved for me to be a memorable effort to impose an interpretation on previously unperceived facts that distinguished the Chinese Communist system from those of imperial China, Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang regime, and Stalin’s Soviet Union that evidently influenced it. Our efforts continue today, as does the PRC’s evolution. Many, but surely not all, legal scholars in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan seem to appreciate our work more than the Global Times author implies.