Despite Russian Claims, Beijing isn’t Copying Moscow’s Repressive Laws, Bazhanov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 8 – In recent years, senior Russian officials, including Sergey Naryshkin, have regularly suggested that Beijing has been copying Russian legislation imposing restrictions on foreign-funded NGOs, claims that helped Moscow to continue to view itself as still the senior partner in relations between the two countries.

            But Pavel Bazhanov, a Russian lawyer who follows Chinese legislation, says that such claims are “mythical” and that China is not copying Russian legislation. Any Chinese interest in Russian law is purely practical and designed to help China do business in Russia (carnegie.ru/commentary/83349).

            China does have research centers that specialize on Russian law, he continues, but these do not provide guidance to Chinese legislators but rather to Chinese businessmen interested in working in Russia and to others who want to protect the rights and interests of Chinese citizens who may be in the Russian Federation.

            There is absolute “no interest in borrowing Russian laws,” Bazhanov says. Chinese law is rooted in the Germanic legal tradition which came to China via Japan. After the communist revolution, the new Chinese legal system did draw on Soviet expertise and at a constitutional level included many Soviet provisions.

            “But that didn’t change the foundation of the Chinese legal system as Soviet legislation was based on the Romano-Germanic” one. At the present time, he argues, “very little in the Chinese legal system is borrowed from contemporary Russian law,” just as very little in the Russian code comes from China.

            First of all, “the two countries don’t study each other’s legal systems sufficiently to make that possible.” China does study Russian law, but in Russia, “there are no centers or experts specializing in Chinese law.” Instead, legal specialists in both countries “are far better versed in Germanic and English law.”

            Second, Bazhanov continues, “both China and Russia are still in the process of constructing their legal systems. Those systems don’t yet look like a perfect model to the other. As a rule, the aim of borrowing is to adopt norms and laws that have already been tried and tested and have proven to be effective. Otherwise, there is no point in borrowing them.”

            And third, and “most important, despite all the similarities between Russian and Chinese domestic political realities, the specific features of each requires that legislation reflect these differences.” The most sensitive issues involving state security, for example, “preclude the copying of laws from other countries.”