Zhu Suli
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Zhu Suli, the Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law, Presents the 2011 Clarke Lecture
On September 28, members of the Cornell community gathered in Anabel Taylor Hall for the Law School's 2011 Clarke Lecture, which is given every year by a high-profile scholar brought to Cornell through the Clarke Program in East Asian Law and Culture. This year's scholar was Zhu Suli of Peking University, who presented "The Unnoticed Functions of Bridewealth in Traditional China." Zhu is not only this year's Clarke Lecturer but also the Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law for 2011-2012. "Coming to visit Cornell Law School is a terrific academic experience for me," says Zhu, "and I will learn a lot from colleagues here, which will certainly challenge and inspire me. And, by the way - the scene around Ithaca in the fall is very beautiful." Zhu, one of China's foremost legal scholars, focuses his research on law and society, judicial process in China, and law and literature. His major books include Sending Law to Countryside (2000, 2010), and Something May Have Happened: Legal Academic Transformation in China (2004), and he has translated the work of Benjamin Cardozo, Richard Posner, and Robert Ellickson into Chinese. Zhu served as dean of Peking University Law School from 2001 to 2010. He has also been a visiting scholar of Harvard-Yenching Institute and Yale Law School. Opening comments at the Clarke Lecture were provided by Stewart J. Schwab, the Allan R. Tessler Dean and Professor of Law, and by Annelise Riles, the Jack G. Clarke Professor of Far East Legal Studies, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Clarke Program. "This is the high point of our year," said Riles, extending thanks to Dean Schwab, to the program's team, and to Jack Clarke '52, whose gift to the Law School funds the Clarke Program, and who was in attendance. Riles then introduced Zhu, lauding him as "truly interdisciplinary in the best sense" and, therefore, an ideal scholar to present the lecture, whose mission is to illuminate issues of pressing concern by fostering collaboration not only across cultures, but also across disciplines. Zhu presented the findings of his research on bridewealth, or "caili," gifts of money and/or goods given by the family of a prospective groom to the bride or to her family. Though caili in traditional Chinese villages has previously been viewed simply as a payment for the transfer of labor or a compensation to the bride's family for the investment of her upbringing, says Zhu, "my research challenges [that] conception and finds the complexity, which is not only interesting as an academic issue, but may be useful to revise [the] law concerned." "Professor Zhu is one of the most original legal scholars I know," said Riles. "His scholarship is informed, innovative, and courageous. He has a true love of ideas, as well as an unsurpassed knowledge of Chinese legal problems and institutions. His energy, seriousness of purpose and scholarly integrity are inspiring." The Clarke Program brings a broad interdisciplinary and humanistic focus to the study of law in East Asia. Through research, teaching, and scholarly dialogue, it seeks to expand the purview of legal scholarship and to develop new ways of thinking about transnational law, politics, and culture. The Clarke Program enriches its offerings by hosting a series of extremely distinguished Chinese law scholars at Cornell Law School every year. Visiting scholars are supported by an endowment created by Anthony W. Wang '68 and his wife, Lulu C. Wang.
Zhu Suli, Peking University Law School - "Problems of Judicial Reform in China and Implications for Legal Rights"
Monday, April 16, 2012 - 4:30pm to 6:00pm Silverman Hall, Room 240B in the Penn Law School Zhu Suli is one of China's foremost legal scholars, focusing his research on law and society, judicial process in China, and law and literature. He is currently Global Visiting Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, and recently served as a visiting professor of Cornell during fall 2011. Previously, Zhu served as dean of Peking University Law School from 2001 to 2010, and has also been a visiting scholar of Harvard-Yenching Institute and Yale Law School. Professor Zhu published over 200 articles, comments, and book reviews on Chinese legal journals, and a few in English. He has published 12 books in Chinese; translated 12 English books into Chinese, and is one of the most cited legal scholars in China. * CEAS China and International Human Rights Colloquium, Penn Law School
The Gift Economy
t’s the Chinese New Year, and the financial press has been full of stories of massive Chinese purchases of gold (for instance here and here), as gold (molded into rabbits to signify that it was given in the year of the rabbit) has emerged as this year’s gift of choice. Chinese buyers are purchasing gold in quantities the market has never seen before not as an investment in the traditional economic sense, but for purposes of satisfying their obligations in the gift economy. The gift economy is something that economists don’t talk much about. It is for the most part treated as an evolutionary precursor to the market economy. The simple story most economic historians tell is a tale of progression from status to contract–from old fashioned relationships built on gifts to modern markets made up of arms-length transactions among strangers. Where the reality of the significance of gifts to modern markets just can’t be avoided, as here (because the price of gold is skyrocketing), the gift economy is usually treated as a cultural oddity, just a little aberration to the general rules of economic action. But anthropologists have amassed generations of data on how gift economies and market economies interact in many societies around the world–how economic tokens like money can become the stuff of gifts, and how gifts (from whales’ teeth in Fiji to sexual relations in New York) can become marketable commodities. It turns out that gift economies are extremely complex and variable phenomena that require as much data and as much theory to understand as market economies. (It would be impossible to even begin to summarize that literature here, but it begins with Marcel Mauss’ classic, The Gift, written a century ago, and after that just about every serious anthropologist has wrestled with the subject in every part of the world. For a great literature review, see Hiro Miyazaki’s chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, Oxford University Press, 2010). Now that the Chinese economy is number two though, it is probably time for the world to start paying attention to what economic anthropologists know about gift-giving: any serious China expert knows that markets don’t work in China without gifts, and that it is through gifts (as well as markets) that every kind of relationship that is significant to markets, from a company’s relations with regulators, to relations among investors to obligations between employers and employees gets built and maintained. Moreover, as the legal scholar and former dean of Peking University Law School Zhu Suli is currently finding, in research to be presented as the 2011 Clarke Lecture at the Cornell Law School, much of the astounding profits of Chinese enterprises are now being funneled into fulfilling stakeholders’ gift obligations–such as the massive resources a young man’s family must hand over to the family of their son’s prospective spouse in exchange for the “gift” of a wife. And it turns out that there is astronomical inflation in the price of brides these days in China, as people become richer, and the supply of daughters becomes ever more limited as a result of the one child policy and families’ preference for sons. You simply can’t understand the logic of Chinese markets, or for that matter of Chinese actors’ investment strategies and economic activities globally, without understanding the theory and practice of gift-giving.
Knowledge Graph
Examples
1 Professor Zhu Suli, Dean of Peking University School of Law, discusses political parties and the judicial system in China for the fifth annual Herbert L. Bernstein Lecture in Comparative Law.
2 The scholar is Professor Zhu Suli, currently Dean of the School of Law at Peking University, one of the best-known legal theorists in China
3 Some have believed (wrongly, according to Zhu Suli) that he wishes to build the rule of law according to China's traditional culture.