Highlighted Manuscripts and Other Work Not Published in Traditional Journals

Abstract: The Chinese state owned enterprise (CSOE) presents an anomaly in the operation of the well-ordered construction of a self-referencing and closed system of liberal democratic internationalism, especially as that system touches on business responsibilities under national and international human rights and environmental law and markets driven norms. The anomaly is sourced in the increasingly distinct and autonomous framework principles within which it is possible to develop conduct based systems respectful of both human and environmental rights which is emerging as between liberal democratic and Marxist-Leninist systems. This essay considers the forms and manifestations of these disjunctions where CSOEs are used as vehicles for the projection of Chinese economic activity beyond its borders. The essay first situates the CSOE within the political ideology of its home state. The CSOE cannot be understood except as a specific expression of that ideology suited to the times and the context in which it operated. The essay then examines the outward projection of the CSOE national model. To that end the essay focuses on the formal structures for CSOE surveillance by state organs that operationalize the guiding ideology through which they are conceived and operated. This provides the basis for a deeper consideration of the way that the projection of CSOEs abroad is structured within a conceptual cage of policy objectives: specifically the Belt & Road Initiative and emerging conceptions of socialist human rights, including environmental rights and obligations, as these are manifested when CSOEs operate abroad. The focus is on the development of conceptions of risk in that context guiding decisions about the conduct of economic activity. The essay concludes with a suggestion of the greater rift between Marxist-Leninist and liberal democratic approaches—the differences in embracing risk models grounded in prevent-mitigate-remedy strategies.

Abstract: When the leaders of the United States and of the Peoples Republic of China refer to human rights, they invoke entirely different conceptions. The only thing in common is the use of the term itself. they invoke entirely different conceptions. Trouble follows incoherence and the normative gaps that this incoherence produces. The difference in meaning drives contests over the meaning of legitimate governance. These consequences affect not just governance, through law, but also the law and governance of the relation among collectives—subsumed under another term, globalization. This contribution suggests the power of semiotics to understand, analyze, and perhaps engage with both the constitution of meaning from which these collectives build and understand themselves, but also to understand the power of law and governance to organize human activity at the most granular level. The contribution starts with a consideration of the semiosis of the fundamental analytical terms: law, globalization, and governance, as a set of aligned but not integrated social-semiotic sub-systems. It then draws on this examination to re-cast the project of human rights legalities as a semiotic contestation—a system of interpenetration centered in law but structurally coupled with globalization and governance. This is undertaken by examining the difference between making meaning within systems (semiotic interiorization), and making meaning of systems (semiotic exteriorization). The role of nihilism as a legal construct (the principle for or against which legalities are deployed) emergence of contested semiotic structures ends the examination. Semiotics provides a basis for navigating what appears to be incoherence built into the simultaneous infusion of multiple meanings and key terms of contemporary legal and institutional life.

Abstract: Social credit can be understood as the building blocks for a legality based on the quantification of objectives and expectations that target people, groups, activity, and their interactions in all spheres of human collective organization. Social credit functions as law as platforms serve as the institutional structures through which it is managed. Together, these serve as the mechanisms of an important sphere socialist legality in the new era woven into and through the traditional systems of law institutionalized through the organs of the administrative state. These are important enough but fail to capture the connection between these mechanisms for expressing political authority and their normative sources in a Marxist Leninist state. This paper focuses on these fundamental interlinkages. The research question is straightforward: in what ways are social credit systems embedded into the conceptualization, and implementation of socialist legality. Two sub-questions follow: (1) how does that embedding shape the character of social credit ‘as’ or ‘in’ the cage of regulation through which the rule of law structures of Chinese constitutionalism are ordered; and (2) in what ways does the implementation of social credit through platforms change or displace traditional forms of the administration of law. To that end, the contribution undertakes a close reading of the progression of State Council SCS White Papers in the context of the recent State Council White Papers on the construction and characteristics of Socialist Democracy and Political Parties in China. The object is to theorize ideologically authoritative Socialist Legality expressed as both the law of and a law for social credit under the leadership and guidance of the Communist Party of China. Lastly, the consequences of this interlinking are explored.

Abstract: This contribution considers the challenges for semiotics, for the understanding of the conditions of meaning in relation to the human that is posed by a global obsession with the control of reality and its instrumentalization through the mechanics of simulation. Simulation describes, predicts and intervene to manage a situation, context, or process it is imitates. While simulation is meant to imitate an environment, through a process of replication made possible by reducing the imitated environment to its essence, semiotics suggests that simulation has a more profound effect. The decisive move toward the objectification of reality and its meaning through its simulation (present) and its modelling (future)–that is the quantification, and digitalization of humanity–has brought humanity to a great transformative moment. If a situation, context, or process is now comprehended as and by its own simulation, then the modalities of objectification, of signification, and ultimately of the encounters with meaning and its making, has now (again) removed itself from an immanent to a transcendent condition. That is, that human activity becomes centered in and manifested through its simulation rather than in the world itself. This, in turn, processes asset of challenges for human institutions and their utilization—law, governance, politics, culture are now more real in simulation than in the reality they were meant to imitate. The essay starts with an examination of the problem. To make the discussion more concrete, the analysis is undertaken in the framework of the challenges for simulating humanity (and thus of saving it from its predicted barbaric fate) created on Isaac Asimov’s “Prelude to Foundation” and the more ancient insights taught in the interpretation of dreams. Asimov’s recounting of the effort to use a planet to simulate the human universe, and of Joseph’s modeling of Pharaoh’s dream nicely frame the central problems of simulation today. The essay then applies these insights to its manifestation in the use of simulations in the early efforts to describe, predict and intervene in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. It considers the way that Jan Broekman has pointed a way forward for semiotics, or at least that branch of its study that points to an understanding of the objectification of subjectivity and the instrumentalization of the “Human, All-Too-Human” essence of the reductionist model. The essay ends with a look to some of the areas of human self-governance in which modeling is now displacing the situations it was meant to imitate and considers what semiotics may bring to this emerging reconstruction of reality and the challenges that it may pose for traditional approaches to understanding the making of meaning.

Abstract: The role of political parties in the Chinese democratic socialist political order has always been deeply misunderstood, even within Chinese academic and popular circles. The misunderstanding at a macro level is likely a product of great ideological battles of the last century between liberal democratic and Marxist Leninist approaches to the organization of states, the positioning of political authority and its exercise through political parties–mass collectives developed for that purpose. These organizational differences reflect an even deeper conceptual gap between the way that these ideologies construct and apply the notion of party within their democratic imaginaries. Though both systems use the same word to describe collective political organization—the ideological basis of the meaning of that term could not produce a greater distance in the way in which meaning is embedded in those terms. This study takes a deeper dive into the current elaboration of the political theory of Chinese socialist constitutional democracy, the role of political parties within it, and the connection between the people and both. To those ends, the study focuses on three key documents produced by the Chinese State Council: (1) 《中国新型政党制度》 (China’s New Political Party System; 25 June 2021); (2) : 中国的民主 (China: Democracy That Works; 4 December 2021); and (3) [美国民主情况] (The State of Democracy in the United States; 5 December 2021). Through the lens of these contemporary elaborations of Chinese Marxist-Leninist theory, the study considers the hypothesis: ‘the emerging theory of Leninist political parties contributes to the development of a coherent theory of endogenous socialist constitutional democracy.’ It’s subsidiary hypothesis is that at least conceptually, the transformation of the ‘mass line’ principle into ‘whole process democracy’ provides a basis within Leninist political theory to link the people to their state institutions through the structuring of a system of well managed mass political organizations under the leadership of the vanguard.