Professor Taisu Zhang on Legality in Authoritarian Regimes

In his class, “Law in Authoritarian Regimes,” Professor of Law Taisu Zhang '08 leads students through an examination of the role of legal institutions and legality in authoritarian regimes. The seminar taught this fall surveys the modern institutional and political history of China, Singapore, Japan, India, and parts of the Islamic world. Through class discussions, Zhang and his students take a deep look at the fundamentals of law and the priorities of autocratic governments.

Zhang’s work focuses on comparative legal and economic history, private law theory, and contemporary Chinese law and politics. He is the author of a trilogy of books on the institutional and cultural origins of early modern economic divergence. The first two volumes — “The Laws and Economics of Confucianism” and “The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation” — have already been published. A forthcoming volume, “The Cultural-Legal Origins of Economic Divergence,” will complete the trilogy.

In this Q&A, he delves into the themes of “Law in Authoritarian Regimes” as well as his upcoming book on the political and socioeconomic logic of legalization in China.

This course surveys the extent to which autocratic governments have supported the rule of law in China, Singapore, Japan, India, and parts of the Islamic world throughout modern history. What can we learn by comparing these regimes across countries?

The course distinguishes the “rule of law,” which does not exist in most authoritarian regimes, with “legality,” which often does. The rule of law is a political ideology in which legal rules must meaningfully constrain the exercise of power at any level of regular politics, whereas legality is simply the technical and systemic enforcement of law within its own terms. The former does not easily coexist with authoritarian dominance, whereas the latter not only does, but often enhances such dominance. One goal of the course is to emphasize the commonality of human legal experience in this latter dimension through examination of all these different regimes.

What parallels might students see from studying these regimes that resonate with contemporary political movements in the U.S. and Europe?

I would not speak of the U.S. and Europe in the same breath here. In many ways, European political structures are far more similar to those in China or Singapore than they are to American ones: more concentration of state power, more administrative statism, more rationalization of the bureaucracy. What differentiates Europe from those countries is, first, the E.U. political superstructure, and second, a rights-oriented legal regime that imposes meaningful rule of law. The U.S. is just fundamentally different from almost everyone else: its governmental power is extremely decentralized by modern standards, and its politics are much less cohesive. One theme in the course is that nominal regime type (“liberal democratic versus authoritarian,” for example) often does not matter as much as the substantive structure of political power, and that the two do not necessarily correlate.

One of your upcoming books is about the authoritarian functions of law — did your research for that project influence this course?

The book’s title is changing all the time: I’m very bad at titles, and my editors are often frustrated with that. Currently the book is just titled “Legality in China,” because in many ways it’s more a theory of law than a theory of authoritarianism. But to answer the question: yes, of course, the book’s main themes echo the course’s main themes, and frankly I could not have written the book without teaching several related seminars across the past decade. It’s a very good example of how teaching and research can sometimes be highly synergistic.