Chinese Legal Reform and the Global Legal Order (Introduction)

"The Law, China and the World: An Introduction"
Yun Zhao & Michael Ng
in Chinese Legal Reform and the Global Legal Order: Adaption and Adoption, (Cambridge University Press, Nov 2017), pp. 1 - 12
Introductory paragraph:  China has undertaken a series of legal reforms of varying scales over the past century, borrowing models from a disparate range of countries.  Since the late Qing period, laws and legal concepts from Germany, France, Switzerland, Japan, the United Kingdom and United States, and the former Soviet Union, among other countries, have been transplanted into China at various times.  The latest wave of legal reforms originated in the office of Xi Jinping, who set the law as the central theme of the  Chinese Communist Party's Eighteenth Central Committee Plenary Session in October 2014.  Yet, despite these century-long efforts, as contributor Li Chen puts it, the reformed Chinese legal system often appears 'too foreign to the Chinese and too Chinese to foreigners'...