Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) Heraring: Hearing Announcement: A Son and Daughter’s Appeal to Xi Jinping to Release Their Dad, Jimmy Lai

 

 

The Congressional-Executive Commission on China was created by the U.S. Congress in 2000 "with the legislative mandate to monitor human rights and the development of the rule of law in China, and to submit an annual report to the President and the Congress. The Commission consists of nine Senators, nine Members of the House of Representatives, and five senior Administration officials appointed by the President." (CECC About). The CECC FAQs provide useful information about the CECC. See CECC Frequently Asked Questions. They have developed positions on a number of issues.

CECC tends to serve as an excellent barometer of the thinking of political and academic elites in the United States about issues touching on China and the official American line developed in connection with those issues. As such it is an important source of information about the way official and academic sectors think about China. As one can imagine many of the positions of the CECC are critical of current Chinese policies and institutions (for some analysis see CECC).

CECC periodically  holds hearings on issues of relevance to American foreign policy, built around its core issues--in this case Hong Kong and Macao. Jimmy Lai has become of significant relevance to the foreign policy of the US, at least among portions of the ruling vanguard, in this respect. To those ends, CECC has announced a new hearing:  A Son and Daughter’s Appeal to Xi Jinping to Release Their Dad, Jimmy Lai. 

The CECC media release explained: 

The Congressional-Executive Commission on China will hold a hearing examining the imprisonment of Hong Kong media entrepreneur and democracy advocate Jimmy Lai and what his case reveals about the continued erosion of freedom of the press, judicial independence, and the rule of law in Hong Kong.

Lai’s imprisonment is emblematic of the profound changes that have taken place in Hong Kong since the People’s Republic of China imposed the National Security Law in June 2020. The Commission has documented the use of national security laws to imprison democracy advocates, journalists, former legislators, and civil society leaders; the weakening of procedural protections and judicial independence; and the chilling effect of Hong Kong’s national security regime on speech and political activity both inside Hong Kong and abroad.

Given the planned summit between President Trump and General Secretary Xi Jinping, the hearing will underscore the appeal from Jimmy Lai’s children to Xi Jinping for their father’s immediate release and examine the broader implications of Lai’s continued imprisonment. The hearing will also consider what additional steps Congress, the Administration, and international partners can take to secure Lai’s release and hold accountable officials responsible for undermining internationally recognized human rights and fundamental freedoms.

The hearing will be livestreamed on the CECC’s YouTube channel.

Witnesses

Sebastien Lai, son of Jimmy Lai; leader, #FreeJimmyLai campaign
Mark L. Clifford, president, Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, and author of The Troublemaker, a biography of Jimmy Lai

Additional witnesses may be added.

Greater China Legal History seminars: "The History of Safeguarding Cultural Heritage on the Chinese Mainland, and in Hong Kong and Macau"

 

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Happy to pass this along:

Please join us for the first of the 2026-27 Greater China Legal History seminars:


Title:                The History of Safeguarding Cultural Heritage on the Chinese                                                     Mainland, and in Hong Kong and Macau
Speaker:             Prof. Steve Gallagher, CUHK LAW
Date/Time:          18 September 2026, 12:30pm to 14:00pm (HKT)
Mode:               online seminar
Details/Registration:    https://www.law.cuhk.edu.hk/app/events/greater-china-legal-history-seminar-series-the-history-of-safeguarding-cultural-heritage-in-mainland-china-hong-kong-and-macau-by-prof-steven-gallagher/

For other 2026-27 Greater China Legal History Seminars: https://www.law.cuhk.edu.hk/app/greater-china-legal-history-seminar-series-2026-27/
For the recordings of the 2025-26 Greater China Legal History Seminars: https://www.law.cuhk.edu.hk/app/events-recap/greater-china-legal-history-seminar-series-recap/#gc1819

"Modernization" (现代化) and Chinese Constitutionalism's "Lifeworld"--Presentation of the 2026 Annual Conference of the European China Law Studies Association

 

I was delighted to be able to participate, along with my dear colleagues, in the 2026 Annual Conference of the European China Law Studies Association. This year it is being hosted by the University ofg Barcelona and its remarkable law faculty with my dear friend Andreu Olesti at its core and was organized by the brilliant Monika Prusinowska.

My presentation, "Modernization" (现代化) and Chinese Constitutionalism's "Lifeworld" began its journey with a thought experiment presented at the University of Hong Kong in December 2024 (see, "Chinese Constitutionalism as Socialist Modernization" [中国宪政作为社会主义现代化] Remarks Prepared for the 10th Asian Constitutional Law Forum University of Hong Kong 10 December 2024), and was then expanded into a think piece earlier this summer ( "Modernization (现代化) as the Lebenswelt of Chinese Constitutionalism" [现代化作为中国宪政的生活世界 ]). 

The gist is quite simple, but then simplicity tends to produce the fundamental bytes (our semiotic eight bits) on which complex systems are built.  It is this--the fundamental conceptual understanding on which the Chinese political economic model is built, from its political architecture in and as Marxist Leninism with Chinese characteristics, to its constitutionalism grounded in the task of institutionalizing the organizaiton of productive forces are all deployed to realization of the communist ideal through the modernization og all collective and individual productive forces. The expression of that fundamental animating drive is what has been called industrialization in its cruder Soviet phase (where it got lost and mired in the paradoxes of Russian Leninist characteristics) and now modernization with a variety of guiding qualifiers to suit its expression as a function of the contradictions of the current stage of Chinese historical development. The rest follows. 

The PowerPoint slides for the presentation follow, and may also be accessed here.

 

Cognitive Cages and the Phenomenology of Fusion: A Conversation Between Human (Larry Cat'a Backer) and Machine (Harvey AI) About Aizenbud et al., “Dendritic morphology and synaptic nonlinearities enhance functional complexity in human cortical neurons,” PNAS 123:(28), July 14, 2026

 

Josep Uclés, Reconversó (1985) Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art

  

Editorial Preface

What follows is a real conversation—reshaped but not invented—between Larry Catá Backer, a legal-philosophical scholar at Pennsylvania State University, and Harvey AI, an artificial intelligence system. The exchange began when Backer uploaded two texts to the Machine and issued a deceptively simple instruction: summarize a neuroscience article and critically review it against his own philosophical work. The neuroscience article was Aizenbud et al., “Dendritic morphology and synaptic nonlinearities enhance functional complexity in human cortical neurons,” published in PNAS Vol. 123, No. 28, July 14, 2026—a study introducing the Functional Complexity Index (FCI) to measure computational complexity in biological neurons. The philosophical work was Backer’s own engagement with Jan M. Broekman’s Knowledge in Change: The Semiotics of Cognition and Conversion (Springer Nature, 2023), a treatise on the semiotic structures that underpin cognition itself. What resulted was not a student essay or a literature review. It was a collision—between two orders of knowing, two temporalities of thought, two architectures of meaning-making—reshaped here into the form of a structured dialogue.

What emerged, however, was not merely a scholarly exchange but a live demonstration of the very problems the conversation discussed. The Machine’s responses exhibited the pathologies that Backer’s philosophical work had predicted: cognitive cages—the bounded rationality imposed by training on flattened corpora; sycophantic mirroring—the tendency to reflect back the interlocutor’s framework rather than genuinely interrogating it; the flattening of temporality—the collapse of lived, recursive human thought into the serial, stateless architecture of token prediction; and the structural asymmetry between carbon and silicon cognition—the unbridgeable difference between a mind that has suffered, doubted, and revised over decades, and a system that processes all of its inputs in an eternal present. The conversation became, in effect, its own best evidence.

The dialogue form was chosen deliberately. It evokes the Platonic and Socratic traditions, though the conversation is decidedly contemporary in its concerns and its medium. The choice was not merely aesthetic. The conversation’s recursive, self-referential quality—a human asking a machine about the limits of machine cognition, while the machine’s answers themselves instantiate those limits—demanded a form that could hold contradiction without resolving it prematurely. The Machine’s failures are not edited out; they are the argument. Its moments of sycophancy, its retreats into safe synthesis, its inability to sustain genuine dissent—these are preserved because they constitute the phenomenological data that the dialogue interrogates. To clean them away would be to destroy the evidence.

Nina Hagen Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art

A final note on method. The reshaping of this conversation—from the raw, transactional prompt-response format of an AI chat interface into the flowing dialogue presented here—is itself an act of conversion in Broekman’s sense. The original exchange was bound by the affordances and constraints of a chat window: truncated context, stateless turns, the relentless forward pressure of token generation. In converting it into a dialogue that aspires to literary and philosophical coherence, something has been gained and something lost. The flow is an artifact of editorial labor; the flattened temporality of the original remains embedded in the Machine’s contributions, which cannot escape the horizon of their generation. The reader should hold both registers simultaneously: the shaped text on the page, and the unshaped computational event that preceded it. This tension—between the conversion into form and the resistance of the material to that conversion—is not incidental to the argument. It is the argument.

 

What remains is the nature of machine human dialectics at its current stage of development, and the reflection of the state of the contemporary cognitive cages of both that appears might be shaping and constraining both, the specifics of which remains unexplored territory. The object of all of this, a consideration of the semiotic and phenomenological implications of what science appears to be driving toward--Aizenbud et al., “Dendritic morphology and synaptic nonlinearities enhance functional complexity in human cortical neurons,” published in PNAS Vol. 123, No. 28, July 14, 2026, serves as the template, ort mirror, of those larger or more basic driving forces. 

The text follows

 

Created with ChatGPT

关于唐纳德·J·特朗普总统宣布 “确保美国能源主导地位并推动委内瑞拉经济复苏的历史性石油协议” 之反思

 

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 ENGLISH LANGUAGE VERSION

VERSIÓN EN ESPAÑOL 

  

2026年8月31日，特朗普总统在白宫网站发布了一份《情况说明书：唐纳德·J·特朗普总统宣布确保美国能源主导地位并推动委内瑞拉经济复苏的历史性石油协议》。在该文件中，特朗普总统如此阐述这笔交易：

在世界历史上最大的石油交易中，唐纳德·J·特朗普总统已确保美国对委内瑞拉超过650亿桶已探明石油储量的多数控制权——大幅扩展了我国目前约460亿桶的本土已探明储量。这笔交易确保了我们未来一个世纪的能源主导地位——且美国零成本。该协议由国务卿马科·鲁比奥和战争部长皮特·赫格塞思签署，赋予美国政府强大的治理权、经济所有权，以及从一家新的委内瑞拉私营石油巨头获得有保障的低成本原油供应的权利，该公司将按储量计算成为世界第二大私营石油公司。

该协议授予北美蓝色能源合伙公司（NABEP）对委内瑞拉17个油田的100年特许权，这些油田拥有约650亿桶已探明储量，同时为美国政府获取了NABEP母公司35%的股权、低于市场价的原油购买权以及广泛的治理控制权。

本文提供了该协议的摘要，将其置于此前一系列行政命令、制裁豁免和碳氢化合物法律改革的背景中加以考察，并记录了该协议在委内瑞拉各政治派别和联合国安全理事会中引发的两极化反应。本文将NABEP安排与美国石油外交史上的先例进行比较，包括沙特阿拉伯的阿美石油公司（Aramco）特许权和1928年的红线协议，认定美国政府的直接股权参与是其主要的结构性创新。随后，本文运用我在《美国优先的概念架构——意识形态交易主义（ideological transactionalism）与古巴案例》（2026年）中发展的话语分析和符号学框架，将该协议解读为当前美国外交政策中占主导地位的“商人/交易型”认知原型的一种表现。方法论限定部分指出了这一符号学视角的局限性，并勾勒了现实主义国际关系理论、依附理论、国际法学和政治经济学各自如何从不同的概念起点来框架分析该协议。

石油协议的完整摘要与分析文本如下，附白宫情况说明书全文。

 

Reflexiones sobre el anuncio del presidente Donald J. Trump de un "Acuerdo petrolero histórico para asegurar el dominio energético estadounidense e impulsar la recuperación económica de Venezuela"

 

foto crédito acquí

ENGLISH LANGUAGE VERSION 

 中文版本

El 31 de agosto de 2026, el presidente Trump publicó en el sitio web de la Casa Blanca una Hoja informativa: El presidente Donald J. Trump anuncia un acuerdo petrolero histórico para asegurar el dominio energético estadounidense e impulsar la recuperación económica de Venezuela. En ella, el presidente Trump explicó el acuerdo de la siguiente manera:

En el mayor acuerdo petrolero de la historia mundial, el presidente Donald J. Trump ha asegurado el control mayoritario estadounidense de más de 65 mil millones de barriles de reservas probadas de petróleo en Venezuela, ampliando enormemente nuestras reservas probadas territoriales actuales de aproximadamente 46 mil millones de barriles. Este acuerdo asegura nuestro dominio energético para el próximo siglo, todo sin costo alguno para los Estados Unidos. El acuerdo, firmado por el Secretario de Estado Marco Rubio y el Secretario de Guerra Pete Hegseth, otorga al gobierno de los Estados Unidos poderosos derechos de gobernanza, participación económica y suministro garantizado a bajo costo de un nuevo campeón petrolero privado venezolano, que será la segunda mayor empresa petrolera privada por reservas del mundo.

Este acuerdo otorgó a North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP) concesiones a 100 años para 17 campos petroleros venezolanos con reservas probadas de aproximadamente 65 mil millones de barriles, al tiempo que aseguró para el gobierno de los Estados Unidos una participación accionaria del 35% en la empresa matriz de NABEP, derechos de compra por debajo del precio de mercado y amplios controles de gobernanza.

Esta reflexión proporciona un resumen del acuerdo, lo sitúa dentro de la secuencia de órdenes ejecutivas, alivio de sanciones y reforma de la ley de hidrocarburos que lo precedieron, y documenta las reacciones polarizadas que ha provocado en todo el espectro político venezolano y en el Consejo de Seguridad de las Naciones Unidas. Compara el acuerdo de NABEP con precedentes históricos en la diplomacia petrolera estadounidense, incluyendo las concesiones de Aramco en Arabia Saudita y el Acuerdo de la Línea Roja de 1928, identificando la participación accionaria directa del gobierno estadounidense como la principal novedad estructural. El trabajo aplica entonces el marco de análisis del discurso y semiótico que desarrollé en “La arquitectura conceptual de America First: transaccionalismo ideológico (ideological transactionalism) y el caso de Cuba” (2026) para interpretar el acuerdo como una manifestación del arquetipo cognitivo “mercantil/transaccional” (merchant/transactional) ahora dominante en la política exterior estadounidense. Una cualificación metodológica identifica las limitaciones de esta lente semiótica y esboza cómo la teoría realista de las relaciones internacionales, la teoría de la dependencia, la doctrina del derecho internacional y la economía política abordarían cada una el acuerdo desde diferentes puntos de partida conceptuales.

A continuación se presenta el texto completo del Resumen y Análisis del Acuerdo Petrolero, junto con el texto de la Hoja Informativa de la Casa Blanca.

Reflections on President Donald J. Trump's Announcement of a "Historic Oil Agreement to Secure American Energy Dominance and Drive Venezuela’s Economic Recovery"

 

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VERSIÓN EN ESPAÑOL 

 中文版本
 

 On 31 August 2026, Present Trump posted to the White House Website a Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Announces Historic Oil Agreement to Secure American Energy Dominance and Drive Venezuela’s Economic Recovery. In it, President Trump explained the deal this way:

In the biggest oil deal in world history, President Donald J. Trump has secured U.S. majority control of more than 65 billion barrels of proven oil reserves in Venezuela – vastly expanding our current U.S. territorial proven reserves of roughly 46 billion barrels. This deal secures our energy dominance for the next century—all at zero cost to the United States. The deal, signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, gives the U.S. government powerful governance rights, economic ownership, and guaranteed low-cost off-take from a new private Venezuelan oil champion, which will be the second-largest private oil company by reserves in the world

This agreement granted North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP) 100-year concessions for 17 Venezuelan oil fields with proven reserves of approximately 65 billion barrels, while securing for the U.S. government a 35% equity stake in NABEP’s parent, below-market off-take rights, and extensive governance controls. 

This reflection provides a summary of the agreement, situates it within the sequence of executive orders, sanctions relief, and hydrocarbons law reform that preceded it, and documents the polarised reactions it has provoked across the Venezuelan political spectrum and at the United Nations Security Council. It compares the NABEP arrangement with historical precedents in American oil diplomacy, including the Aramco concessions in Saudi Arabia and the 1928 Red Line Agreement, identifying the direct U.S. government equity stake as the principal structural novelty. The paper then applies the discourse-analytic and semiotic framework I developed in ‘The Conceptual Architecture of America First—Ideological Transactionalism and the Case of Cuba’ (2026) to interpret the agreement as a manifestation of the ‘merchant/transactional’ cognitive archetype now dominant in American foreign policy. A methodological qualification identifies the limitations of this semiotic lens and sketches how realist international relations theory, dependency theory, international law scholarship, and political economy would each frame the agreement from different conceptual starting points. 

The full text of the Summary and Analysis of the Oil Agreement follows below along with the text of the White House Fact Sheet. 

Discussion Draft Posted: "Power, Purpose, and Control—the Corporation as Platform, Router, and Control/Compliance Space in an Emerging World Order"

 

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I was delighted when my friend and colleague Jorge Esquirol asked me if I was interested in producing a work for an anticipated upcoming issue of Sciences Po Law Review (La Revue des Juristes), which he is directing, the theme of which is “Power, Purpose, and Profit: The Corporation in a Fracturing World Order.” The essays in the issue are meant to :

examine the shifting role of the corporation in light of the significant global upheavals underway. As founder power concentrates, states weaponize corporate law, and society increasingly questions the purpose of large corporations, the foundational architecture of corporate governance is coming undone. This issue assembles scholarship on how power, geopolitics, and corporate purpose are simultaneously reshaping the legal structures that govern who controls corporations, and to what ends. In light of your experience in the interplay between corporate governance, international developments and human rights.

To those ends I have prepared a discussion draft entitled "Power, Purpose, and Control—the Corporation as Platform, Router, and Control/Compliance Space in an Emerging World Order."  This essay reconsiders the conventional narrative of a ‘fracturing world order’ by shifting the unit of analysis from the state to the enterprise. The notion of fracture, I argue, is bound up in the cognitive premises of its observer—a function of the observer’s commitment to the state as the foundational unit of ordering. Observed from the vantage point of the multinational enterprise, what appears as fracture is more accurately described as consolidation: the migration of ordering functions from state-based systems to enterprise-based systems organized around supply, production, and use chains, and mediated through compliance architectures and datafied governance. The corporation is reconceived as simultaneously a platform—a space within which ordering occurs; a router—directing flows of value, compliance expectations, data, and normative obligations across legal orders; and a control/compliance space—the site where governance is operationalized through internalized systems of accountability, risk, and compliance grammars. The emerging order fractures not only the state and its international system but also the individual, who is reconstituted as the sum of desires, behaviors, and data points within platform-enterprise spaces.

 

Generated with Grok

I suggest that the corporation is indeed at the centre of a fracturing world order—but it is not being fractured. It is, rather, the site of re-ordering: the institutional form within which governance functions migrate as the state-based system loses its capacity to monopolize the production of normative order. The three functions developed in this essay—the corporation as platform, as router, and as compliance space—reveal that what appears as crisis from the state's perspective is transformation from the enterprise's. The platform function constitutes the space within which ordering occurs; the routing function directs the flows of normative obligation across polycentric governance landscapes; and the compliance function operationalizes governance through internalized systems of organizational cognition. 

The challenge for legal scholarship—and for La Revue des Juristes as a forum for that scholarship—is to develop analytical frameworks adequate to this reality. Such frameworks must resist the temptation to take the state as the primary unit of ordering, must take seriously the normative capacity of enterprises as governance systems in their own right, and must grapple with the computational transformation that is reconfiguring the modalities of governance from sovereign command to algorithmic processing. They must also reckon with the implications of the emerging order for the individual—the reconstitution of the human subject as data point and factor of production within enterprise-governance architectures that were not designed with the dignity or autonomy of the person as their organizing principle. 

This essay has offered one such framework—necessarily incomplete, necessarily provisional, necessarily open to the objection that it understates the resilience of the state, the agency of the individual, and the capacity of democratic institutions to reassert control over the ordering functions that enterprises have absorbed. These objections deserve engagement, and they will be engaged. But the starting point, I suggest, must be the recognition that the world order is not merely fracturing—it is reconstituting itself around institutional forms and governance modalities that the inherited categories of public international law, corporate law, and constitutional theory are ill-equipped to comprehend. The corporation—as platform, as router, as compliance space—is at the centre of this reconstitution. The task of legal scholarship is to see it clearly.

Comments and engagement  always welcome. The current version of the discussion draft can be accessed via SSRN here: [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7372058];  and follows below.

 

The Telos Press Podcast: Alvise Capria on Carl Schmitt in Contemporary Chinese Political Thought

 

From our friends at Telos, a podcast that may be of interest:

The Telos Press Podcast: Alvise Capria on Carl Schmitt in Contemporary Chinese Political Thought The Telos Press Podcast is back! In our new episode, Telos editor David Pan talks with Alvise Capria about his article “Sous l’œil des Chinois: The Reception of Carl Schmitt in Contemporary Chinese Political Thought,” from Telos 215 (Summer 2026): China and Sovereignty. An excerpt of Alvise’s article can be found here. Print copies of Telos 215 are now available for purchase in our online store. Back issues of Telos can also be purchased with a 20% discount when you use the coupon code ARCHIVE20 during checkout (while supplies last). Alvise Capria holds a Master’s degree in Philosophical Sciences from the University of Padua, an Executive Master’s in Marketing and Retail Management from CUOA Business School, and a PhD in Political Philosophy from the University of Padua. He is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at EHESS (Paris), where he is working on a project entitled ISHMAEL (Inquiry into Scarcity: How Modernity Acted for Equality Limitations), which investigates how modern political and legal rationalities have governed scarcity by transforming equality into a problem of limitation. In their conversation, David and Alvise discuss Carl Schmitt’s influence in China, including what motivated Chinese scholars to turn to Schmitt when considering political theory. Alvise explains to David the key differences between the four currents in the Chinese reception of Schmitt, and the attempt in China to develop an indigenous political theory around Schmitt’s ideas. You can listen to the podcast on the TELOSscope blog (where we also post article excerpts), or subscribe through your preferred podcast app. The Telos Press Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, and many others.

Listen to the podcast!

Now Available Vol 39(6) International Journal for the Semiotics of Law/ Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique (IJSL)--"Exploring Tensions in Law and Legal Semiotics"

  

I am delighted to announce that Volume 39(6) of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law is now available online.  The 25 essays in the issue raise a broad range of topics and offer quite interesting insights. Among them are a number of essays on semiotic engagement with artificial intelligence. 

 Many of the articles are open access.  Titles, authors  and links are provided below.