Beyond the Regulatory State: China and 'Rule of Law' in a Post-Fordist World

Michael W. Dowdle (1)

1 REGNET - Regulatory Institutions Network

Investigations into China's law and legal system invariably presume that China's many regulatory problems are problems of a regulatory laggard--that they are problems that stem from China's failure to as yet construct a mature legal system, such as those found in the advanced industrial countries of the so-called ―West‖ (particularly that of the United States). In this paper, I argue that this is not necessarily the case. China may actually, in many aspects, be operating at the very forefront of the regulatory horizon, compelled by its location in a distinctly post-Fordist Asian economic world to confront regulatory problems that are just beginning to seep into the still largely ―Fordist‖ West. Many of China's regulatory problems, in other words, may often be those of a regulatory pioneer, not those of a regulatory laggard, in the sense that many of its regulatory problems are likely to be problems of the post-Fordist world into which we are moving, rather than problems of the Fordist world from which our present regulatory understandings are derived.

Domaines: Science politique

Michael W. Dowdle. Beyond the Regulatory State: China and 'Rule of Law' in a Post-Fordist World. 2010. ⟨hal-01069424⟩