First Week of Classes

We started law school again this week. We're taking Elementary Chinese, Civil Law, Constitutional Law, Criminal Law, Company Law, Chinese Judicial System, and an elective called "General Information about China." The latter course considers Chinese culture in four parts, using four different professors over the course of the term, and covers everything from Chinese philosophy to Chinese history. I enjoyed the General Information and Criminal Law classes the most.

The G.I. class was best because the material was really interesting, and the professor didn't just read off of his slides. Moreover, he gave us a really good overview of the historical focus of Chinese philosophy, as compared to Western thinking. Whereas Western philosophy focused on ontology and the nature of existence, the Chinese focused more on the way (dao), simplicity, and producing change through opposites. (i.e. men and women, as opposites, produce children) Indeed, the most widely-read Chinese classic is the I Ching, or Book of Changes, a book that is, according to the professor, at the crux of Chinese thinking. You see this focus on change and opposites throughout China--just think about the changes in China over the past 30 years, and you will see what I mean. As for simplicity, however, the Chinese banking system still has a few considerations to reflect upon.

The Criminal Law professor read his slides to a certain degree, but he supplemented the information on them, and had mannerisms that reminded me vaguely of my high school history teacher, Massimo Maglioni. Moreover, something that we learned from him on Friday morning arose in the news that very afternoon, when the Chinese Supreme Court handed down new rules on capital crimes. The Court ordered that the death penalty should be applied more sparingly in cases requiring a death sentence, including economic crimes and instances of family-on-family murder. Underlying the Court's order, however, were Confucian (read: feudal) principles.

According to our professor, feudal law contained the so-called "Ten Atrocities," which called for the greatest of punishments in certain situations (i.e. being torn limb from limb if you killed a family member), and the "Eight Considerations," which required leniency in punishment if you surrendered yourself. (Unless, of course, you committed rape or murder.) To the casual observer, then, it might seem weird to see that Chinese law requires capital punishment if a defendant's murder victim is also the defendant's family member, but not if they are unrelated. To the student of Chinese history, however, you learn that feudal concepts run rampant throughout Chinese law, even after Communism.

Following classes, we had a Friday field trip unlike any field trip in grade school: the bus was not yellow, the bus driver smoked Marlboro Reds the entire time, and we did not visit the Kansas Cosmosphere or the Museum of Natural History. Instead, we visited King & Wood. King & Wood is the largest law firm in 中国 (Zhongguo, or China), with 1,000 attorneys throughout the country (as well as in California's Silicon Valley), and serves as lead counsel for the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee. The trip was largely an opportunity for King & Wood to recruit us, in particular the native English-speakers, but we did learn the following about the Chinese legal market:

• There are 130,000 attorneys in China, at a per capita ratio of 1:10K, but 80% of them practice in Chinese courts, so there's a big need for transactional attorneys, particularly in media, intellectual property, and technology law.
  
• There are 1,000 firms and 11,000 attorneys in Beijing, but only 10 large law firms.
• There are 250 branch offices of foreign law firms in China and 500 foreign attorneys, but none of the foreign firms can practice Chinese law.
  
• The need for foreign attorneys in Chinese and foreign law firms involves language-related skills; that is, Chinese attorneys need American attorneys to do a second pass on documents drafted in English by native Chinese speakers.
• The average starting salary of a first-year associate in a top Chinese law firm is around $10K USD a year. Given that starting salaries at top firms in NYC are at $160K, can you say "arbitrage?"
• King & Wood requires all of its attorneys to be bilingual, preferably in English, and 70% of its business involves international business.

We were also reminded of how the Chinese attach credibility to American faces when, half-way through the presentation, a camera crew came in with professional-grade equipment to capture clips for some of King & Wood's marketing materials. Nevertheless, the key take-away of our interactions with the attorneys at King & Wood was that we need to learn Mandarin.

Thankfully, we're spending a lot of time in language classes. Indeed, we're supplementing our required language class with ten hours a week of private tutoring. On Tuesdays and Thursdays we meet with a graduate student from the Chinese as a Second Language Program at BeiDa. On Mondays and Wednesdays we meet with our tutor from 1 on 1 Mandarin, a company that has offices near the WuDaoKou subway station. In the long run, I think we will just study with Lionel four days a week, as the 1 on 1 Mandarin instruction costs a lot. But for anyone thinking of coming to China to learn the language, I would suggest going with 1 on 1 Mandarin--they provide a nice environment to learn Chinese, and they have a good set-up to do immersion classes.

In any event, it's time to get started on our reading for next week. I have to do a presentation on Max Weber in our Chinese Judicial System class.