RICERCA ITALIANA     

Law, Languages, Culture: the influence of European legal patterns on contemporary China

Università degli Studi di Torino

Abstract

The starting point of the project, the influence of the European patterns of private and public law in the People's Republic of China, constitutes a line of research not yet studied in detail, considering the complex skills required to fulfil it.
Yet in the recent years this kind of analysis should not be postponed because of the increasing volume of trade exchanges between China and Europe.
The research on the influence of the European law on the People's Republic of China plays an important role in the Italian context where the approach to Chinese legal studies is not sufficiently centred on the attitude of the legal domain to influence the linguistic and cultural experience and vice versa. At the same time, the approach to these studies requires to overcome the straight separation of legal fields (public law - private law, macro-comparative research – micro-comparative research), whereas the legal phenomenon tends to be diffusive.
In a plain understanding of Chinese legislative text, as well as in the drafting of the legal documents, the questions related to the legal communication in different languages are not only those of the translation. Moreover, the legal and linguistic issues are rooted in the matter of the legal intakes and the diffusion of legal patterns. The vagueness and the ambiguity of Chinese legal terms derive from European macro-notions embedded in the polysemic Chinese language.
From the public law perspective >>>

Principal Investigator

Gianmaria AJANI Università degli Studi di TORINO

Research Objectives

The research related to the influence of European law on People's Republic of China constitutes a scientific priority field in the Italian context where the approach to Chinese legal studies is not sufficiently centred on the attitude of the legal domain to influence the linguistic and cultural experience and vice versa. At the same time, the approach to these studies requires to overcome the straight separation of legal fields (public law - private law, macro-comparative research – micro-comparative research), whereas the legal phenomenon tends to be diffusive.
The problem of the language, together with the associated translation issues, is constituted not only by the Chinese linguistic-semantic comprehension, but also by our ability to identify the semantic boundaries of the political, legal and juridical Chinese terminology, which is often impervious to Western languages translation, as shown, for example, by the expression "san ge daibiao" (the so called "three representativenessess"), in spite of the fact it has both political-institutional and legal implications.
Thus, the research is conducted not only with the Western perspective, but also with the Asian perspective. This double inquiry is guaranteed by several scholars involved in the project and specialists of Japanese legal system (with direct access to the legal sources and visiting at Japanese Universities, see researcher table of Unit 1), of south-east Asian law (with extended academic >>>

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

The scientific background of the proposed research is provided by the state of the art in the field of Comparative Legal Systems.
In particular, the proposed research fits within the framework of investigations dedicated to the diffusion of private and public law patterns in the People's Republic of China.
However, the specific line of inquiry adopted in this research project covers certain areas not yet analysed in detail neither in public law studies and comparative private law studies and legal terminological studies.
Furthermore, in the Italian context there are a few researches on the topic of the perception of legitimacy and law in China in comparison with the Western one and particularly the European one, which of course imply dramatic differences in cultural tradition.

As to public law studies, the majority of studies are conducted, on one side, within the Chinese context taking into consideration the Chinese perspective, less workable for Europeans because of the linguistic barriers, and on the other side the western "observers", mainly focused on the fundamental rights (for example the freedom of religion) and the separation of powers and the institutions of democracy and federalism, emerging from the United States experience.
Even with the benefits of the almost extended translations offered by the periodical "Chinese Law & Government", the national and international scientific basis of the research on >>>