The Dilemmas of Self-Assertion: Chinese Political Constitutionalism in a Globalized World

Political constitutionalism emerged on the Chinese academic scene in the mid-2000s as a countermovement to the rights-based, court-centered, and textual mainstream in Chinese constitutional scholarship. On the surface, it has launched a biting and sophisticated critique of academic and institutional Westernization and reasserted a sense of Chinese constitutional particularity. However, contrary to its intellectual self-representation as a genuinely Chinese phenomenon, the movement’s academic formation, methodological agenda, and theoretical vocabulary are inseparable from global ideological trends and draw heavily on European and American precedents. Consequently, the movement is troubled by a set of performative contradictions. These include the contradiction between its transnational genealogy and nationalist agenda; its pluralist theoretical makeup and anti-pluralist political rhetoric; as well as its putatively value-neutral sociological methodology and the politically selective application of said methodology. These antinomies, I argue, speak to the recurring dilemmas of “national” self-assertion in a globalized world.