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--(1) from its political architecture in and as Marxist Leninism with Chinese characteristics, (2) to its constitutionalism grounded in the task of institutionalizing the organizaiton of productive forces--is that the entirety of the collective ordering of the nation must be deployed to realization of the communist ideal through the modernization of 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.
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