Administrative law speaks to the nature of the state-individual relationship in any given society. China’s administrative law reforms have in large part been determined by the interaction between, and co-influence of, traditional ideologies and practices, on the one hand, and modern notions of governance and power, on the other hand. Under the auspices of the Programme, leading PRC academics and members of the judiciary have also been invited to deliver public lectures on Chinese administrative law. Also, our research on the enforcement of securities laws by China’s regulatory bodies has been supported by the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

The project on bibliographies on Chinese law is an ongoing contribution to the series Oxford Bibliographies in Chinese Studies (www.oxfordbibliographies.com/obo/page/chinese-studies). The project provides expert recommendations on the best works available in the study of Chinese law post 1949: journal articles, book chapters, book, websites, blogs, or data sets. It aims to serve as an authoritative guide with scholarly accuracy and objectivity to the current scholarship on a topic with original commentary and annotations by the project’s participating scholars. Participating contributors are Dr Lin Yang, Professor Michael Palmer, Professor Xi Chao and Dr Zhou Ling.

The traditional Chinese approaches to economic growth have placed considerable pressure on the environment and strained the ecological balance. The rise of an environmental rights consciousness has helped to move environmental law from the periphery to the centre stage of China’s legal reforms. The emergence of new environmental principles, rules, procedures, and institutional arrangements has involved intensive interactions between the state, society, and individuals. Our research on firms that have been polluting the Pearl River Delta and the mechanisms making it possible for them to do so has attracted substantial funding support from The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

China’s post-1970s legal reform is a process of progressively transplanting Western legal doctrines, rules, and institutions. It is a dramatic process in which China’s endogenous legal tradition and culture is interacting with legal institutions and cultures that originated from Western jurisdictions. Among a few of the issues at the centre of scholarship on comparative law are 1) the invention of a benchmark for assessing the effectiveness of a legal transplant, 2) the conditions for a successful legal transplant, and 3) the cultural and language underpinnings of a legal transplant. Here, the Chinese experience is of considerable relevance. A conference on “Legal Transplant: Technicalities, Language, and Culture”, organized by the Programme, contributed to the ongoing discourse on legal transplants.

“One Country, Two Systems” is an important constitutional doctrine and institution of the PRC’s legal system. Since the handover in 1997, many cross-border legal issues have arisen from the “One Country, Two Systems” principle, and they have important legal and social implications. In our research, we have explored and monitored recent changes in cross-border drug use in Hong Kong, and evaluated current policies on cross-border drugs, using both qualitative and quantitative methods. This research has received funding support from the Security Bureau of the Hong Kong government.