This pap er draws on the notion of the dual state\, developed in the 1930s by Ernst Fraenkel\, to discuss China’s current legal-political system. The Party-Sta te’s institutional and legislative reforms since the beginning of the Refor m and Opening era reflect certain principles of order\, fairness and legali ty connected to the idea of a normative state. Yet\, in recent years\, ther e has been a marked expansion of a ‘prerogative-state’ system for the use o f terror and violence in order to give effect to the will of the political leadership. Drawing on Fraenkel’s argument that the dual state is incapable of meeting the requirements of the law of reason (Vernunftrecht)\, I argue that the current Chinese Party-State ‘needs’ to reject liberal legal and p olitical principles the more strenuously\, the more obviously it becomes im plicated in their violation\, and consider the domestic and transnational i mplications of the prerogative state’s growth in China.
Eva Pils is Reader in Transnational Law at The Dickson Poon School of Law at King’s College London\, where she teaches human rights\, public law\, and law and society in China. She studied law\, philosophy and sinology in Heidelberg\, London and Beijing and holds a PhD in law from University College London. Her scholarship focuses on human rights\, authoritarianism\, and law in Chi na. She has written on these topics in both academic publications and the p opular press. She is author of China’s human rights lawyer s: advocacy and resistance (Routledge\, 2014) an d of Human rights in China: a social practice in the shadows of authoritarianism (Polity\, for thcoming\, 2017). Before joining King’s\, Eva was an associate professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law. She is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the U S-Asia Law Institute of New York University Law School\, an ex ternal member of the Chinese University of Hong Kong Centre for So cial Innovation Studies\, an external fellow of theBingham Centre for the R ule of Law and a legal action committee member of the Global Legal Action Network.< /strong> In April 2017\, she was a Visiting Professor of Law at Columbi a Law School.
