In progress; last updated Feb. 18, 2010
Below is a description of some of the resources for Chinese law research available at the law school (in most cases, through the law school library). It is not a complete list; its purpose is to bring to your attention valuable sources you might not otherwise know about. For Chinese law research in general, check out my page on research guides to Chinese law.
A good 3-volume looseleaf set with articles on dozens of subjects, mostly by practitioners. By and large up to date.
The author is a librarian at Washington University Law School in St. Louis, and this is a very helpful book.
The following two periodicals are very good for keeping up with the latest in Chinese law, at least as far as it's of interest to foreign lawyers and business people. Both are currently available on Lexis/Nexis and Westlaw. The links to the electronic versions work if you're connecting from a GW IP address.
Note: Many of these resources are accessible only from a GWU or GWU Law School IP address. In some cases a wireless connection is not good enough, and you must use Gelman Library's proxy server. Accessibility changes over time, so what works or doesn't work one month may not work or work another month. Keep trying!
This is a good set of laws and regulations offered both in English and Chinese. The translations are generally good, although not infallible. Click on "CCH Business and Management" on the library's database page. You can select this database by using the Browse function on the web site.
The GWU Law Library now provides access to two legal databases maintained by Beijing University: ChinaLawInfo (in Chinese) and LawInfoChina (in English). Although the latter is not simply a translated version of the former -- the task is just too big -- both provide legislation, case reports, and secondary materials such as articles on various subjects. Both are available through a computer connected to the law school network (including via a wireless connection). To sign in to ChinaLawInfo, click all the boxes above the button for "IP Sign-in" (IP 登录) and then click that button.
This is a quite comprehensive free database of Chinese laws and regulations. It includes a great deal of local legislation, departmental regulations, and Supreme People's Court interpretations. The main drawback is that it is not full-text-searchable; you can search by terms in the title or the issuing body. A nice feature is that you can separate central from local legislation in your results.
An excellent source for articles from virtually all periodicals in China on virtually all subjects. GWU's access is only to a subset, but it's the subset that's useful to us: law, economics, and social science generally. This database is searchable by author, journal name, title, keywords, and full text. It is, of course, in Chinese. You can download PDF files of articles you find. This is now accessible from a law school (or, I believe, GW) IP address; click here.
The China Documentation Center has a list of databases. Note in particular the Policies and Laws Database. This is a subset of the Wanfang Database, which includes a number of other databases (including one of Chinese periodicals). Also useful are China Data Online (about which see below) and ChinaInfoBank, an excellent database that provides access to many different kinds of information -- in particular economic news, but also laws, statistics, and corporate documents.
Several useful databases are accessible through Gelman Library; check out the Global Resources Center. Especially useful are the following:
- Bibliography of Asian Studies: Very extensive, but always a few years out of date.
- China Data Online: Want to know the gross domestic product of Yunnan in 1985? Here's where to go. This contains the contents of all those yearbooks that China produces so copiously. Unfortunately, the data are entered manually and that means mistakes happen.
- Economist Intelligence Unit: They have quite an extensive set of publications on China, regularly updated.
- World News Connection: This is the successor to the Joint Publications Research Service and the Foreign Broadcast Information Service; it contains translations -- typically quite good -- of material appearing in the Chinese press. Occasionally it has translations of statutes. Hint: make "("Article 1" and "Article 2" and "Article 3")" part of your search string.