U.S.-Asia Law Institute Research Scholar Chi Yin published an article, “People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump: The Trial and Conviction of a Former U.S. President,” on Wolters Kluwer’s Chinese language website. She and her co-author, Arthur Chiu of Cyan Law Firm, analyze the former president’s conviction in the hush-money case to clarify common misunderstandings in China about the US criminal justice system and its relationship to the political system.
This Week in Asian Law
This Week in Asian Law (August 4-10): An unmarried Chinese woman loses her five-year legal battle to be allowed to freeze her eggs; a Hong Kong citizen challenges the Environmental Protection Agency’s green light to build a 600-hectare tech hub adjoining Shenzhen; a Japanese court convicts a local police officer of leaking confidential information from more than 100 cases to a journalist; South Korean authorities indict the founder of the tech giant Kakao on charges of stock price manipulation; Taiwan’s Constitutional Court hears oral arguments in a challenge to a set of legislative amendments that significantly expand the power of the Legislative Yuan.
Manufactured Threat? Assessing Nippon Steel’s Plan to Buy U.S. Steel
Economic nationalism is one of the few things that can unite Democrats and Republicans these days. Politicians in both parties have spoken out against Nippon Steel’s planned purchase of former giant U.S. Steel. But does the transaction truly pose a threat to US interests? Is steel still a strategic industry or does it merely evoke nostalgia for an industrial past? What national security or economic interest is at stake? After all, Japan is our most important ally in the Asia-Pacific region. And what kind of reviews must be passed for the deal to go through? Bruce Aronson assesses the proposed transaction.
Legal Dialogue, Chinese Style
Legal scholars in China generally refrain from criticizing official policies in public. Qin (Sky) Ma writes that scholars’ response to the feared shutdown of the China Judgments Online (中国裁判文书网) at the end of 2023 was a noteworthy deviation from the norm. It showed that the space for critical discourse, though constrained, is not entirely closed and that strategic engagement by scholars can have impact.
Japanese Government Honors Professor Frank K. Upham
[Recording] High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy
China’s success in cultivating Big Tech firms has enabled it to emerge as a formidable rival to the United States in the digital sphere. But in the past few years, the Chinese government has embarked on a massive regulatory crackdown, targeting its largest tech corporations such as Alibaba, Tencent, and Meituan. Many Western experts have viewed this tech crackdown as an assault on private businesses, causing doubt among investors about whether Chinese firms are still investable. Professor Angela Zhang will go beyond the headlines to unravel the dynamic complexity of China’s regulatory governance. Drawing insights from her newly published book, High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy, she will introduce the dynamic pyramid model of regulation, an analytical framework that demystifies Chinese regulatory governance. She will examine the impact of the tech crackdown on the administrative state, the competitive landscape, and global tech rivalry. And she will peer into the future by examining China’s strategy for regulating generative artificial intelligence.
[Recording] Advocating for Uyghurs in China and in the US
Materials from China’s Xinjiang region, including cotton and polysilicon, permeate global supply chains. All products made with such materials are presumptively banned from the United States under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which took effect almost two years ago. Ned Levin, an attorney who has investigated forced labor in China and represents Uyghur asylum seekers in the United States, will explain how the UFLPA came about, how it works, the steps the US government has taken to enforce this massive and unprecedented new mandate, and reactions from companies and trade groups. He will also discuss his work with Uyghur asylum seekers, the challenges they face, and the importance of granting Uyghurs safe haven.
[Recording] Chinese Companies in the US Legal System
Chinese companies that operate in the US face an increasingly complex legal and political landscape. Rising geopolitical tensions between China and the US make it difficult for Chinese multinationals to comply with the laws of both countries. But they are reluctant to leave the US, having made substantial investments here. In Negotiating Legality: Chinese Companies in the U.S. Legal System, Ji Li uses interviews and survey data to tell the story of how Chinese companies develop in-house legal capacities, engage with US legal professionals, and navigate litigation in US courts.
[Recording] The Importance of US-Japan Scholarly Exchanges
One of the missions of the U.S.-Asia Law Institute is to facilitate scholarly exchanges between the US and East Asian countries, with Japan as one of our most important partners. USALI is part of a wider effort at NYU School of Law to be an international law school and foster scholarly conversation across borders. Pursuing these goals takes constant effort. Technology makes it easier for scholars around the world to read each other’s work, but we still face the barriers of language, culture, and divergent perspectives. Now as the world is increasingly fractured by geopolitical rivalries, might this ideal recede even further? Our extraordinary panel of discussants with a range of perspectives on international academic exchanges talked about why scholarly exchanges matter, how we can incentivize them, and what we lose when scholarship becomes parochial, with a focus on the case of Japan-US exchanges.