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.
Tamar Groswald Ozery argues that risks to investors may actually be worsened by US enforcement of the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act, which was enacted in the name of investor protection. Ozery describes the HFCA as part of a geopolitical agenda of decoupling, but says it is backfiring by enhancing the Chinese government’s control over Chinese issuers.
Following the recent Chinese balloon incident, both Washington and Beijing would do well to recall lessons from a failed CIA espionage mission in China 70 years ago, says Jerome A. Cohen. US refusal to acknowledge the CIA’s role resulted in its own agent, John T. Downey, spending almost 21 years in a Chinese prison. The most obvious lesson: how counterproductive it is for governments to engage in lying.
Rangita de Silva de Alwis, who joined the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women in January 2023, shares her vision for future development of the jurisprudence of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.
China’s National People’s Congress has just approved an ambitious new Ecological and Environmental Code (生态环境法典) to unify and update the country’s previously fragmented ecological and environmental governance framework. USALI visiting scholar Feng Ge assesses the achievements of codification, but notes that the Code weakens the ability of civil society organizations to help enforce the law through environmental public interest litigation.
President Joe Biden’s decision to block Nippon Steel’s proposed acquisition of U.S. Steel was criticized as a bid for union support in an election year. Based on information that has come out in subsequent litigation, we now know that the committee charged with reviewing the transaction did identify national security concerns that were rooted in factors unique to the global steel market and Nippon Steel.
The most significant, long-running corporate governance scandal in the history of Japan may finally be coming to a head. Following a series of misdeeds and clashes with activist investors over the past seven years, Toshiba Corporation, an icon of the Japanese business establishment, is in negotiations to sell itself to a Japanese private equity fund.