About Institute of International Law, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

Institute of International Law, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

The Institute of International Law, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, is a constituent research institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing, listed separately from the Institute of Law in CASS's official Organisations directory, and described in its own introduction as an important research centre of international law in China. Uniquely among the institutes in this group, it was not inherited by CASS in 1977 or founded directly in the academy's first expansion. It grew, over fifty years, out of the Institute of Law itself: a Research Group of International Law established inside the Institute of Law in 1959 became a Research Department of International Law in September 1978, then an independent Centre for International Law directly under CASS in October 2002, and finally, in September 2009, the Institute of International Law, in parallel with the Institute of Law. It researches public international law, private international law, international economic law and international human rights law, publishes the Chinese Review of International Law — inaugurated in 2014 and described by the institute as the first original Chinese periodical of international law in China with an official publication registration — and trains master's, doctoral and postdoctoral researchers in its four fields. Its scholars serve as arbitrators, advisers to China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Supreme People's Court, and members of international law bodies, making the small institute — 35 full-time staff at the time of its official introduction — a concentrated national centre for the law between states.

From a 1959 research group inside the Institute of Law

The institute's official history begins a year after its parent. In 1959, the year following the establishment of the Institute of Law under the Division of Philosophy and Social Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Research Group of International Law was established under the Institute of Law. International law was thus present in the CASS law community from almost the beginning, but as a group within a domestic-law institute, not as an institution in its own right. In May 1977, with the approval of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, CASS was formally established on the basis of the Division of Philosophy and Social Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; the international law group passed into the new academy still inside the Institute of Law. The first step towards independence came in September 1978, when the Research Group of International Law was restructured to form the Research Department of International Law. That date is significant: 1978 was the year reform and opening up began, and a China re-engaging with the world — joining international organisations, attracting foreign investment, negotiating treaties — needed international lawyers in a way the more closed decades had not. For the next twenty-four years the department built the scholarship, personnel and reputation from which a separate institute could eventually be formed.

Independence in 2002 and the name of institute in 2009

In October 2002, the Centre for International Law was established on the basis of the Research Department of International Law, with the approval of the Chinese government, as an independent research institution directly under CASS, in parallel with the Institute of Law. The change was more than a renaming. A centre directly under the academy, rather than a department inside another institute, had its own leadership, establishment and academic identity, and it could represent Chinese international law scholarship institutionally at home and abroad. In September 2009, again with the approval of the Chinese government, the Centre for International Law was renamed the Institute of International Law, and Professor Chen Zexian served as the first director of the institute. Chen had led the centre into institute status and is identified in the institute's introduction with its international criminal law work, as vice president of the Society of International Criminal Law. From September 2017 to November 2018, Professor Chen Su, the director of the Institute of Law, served as acting director of the Institute of International Law — an arrangement that underlines how closely the two sister institutes remain connected. In November 2018, Professor Mo Jihong became director of the Institute of International Law; the joint history projects of the two institutes in 2024 record Mo Jihong in that period as director of the Institute of Law as well, the two institutes sharing leadership figures, a joint party committee and a common site and history exhibition, while keeping separate research remits. In 2019 the institute marked the tenth anniversary of its official establishment under its present name, using the occasion, in its own words, to plan stronger think tank construction and a world-oriented academic platform.

Four research departments and a small, senior staff

The institute's structure is compact and maps exactly onto the classical divisions of its discipline. It has four research departments — public international law, private international law, international economic law and international human rights law — one editorial office, that of the Chinese Review of International Law, and one administrative department, the department of research administration. At the time of its official introduction it had 35 full-time staff members, including nine research fellows, equivalent to full professors, and ten associate research fellows, equivalent to associate professors; four research fellows were qualified to supervise doctoral programmes and fourteen fellows and associate fellows to supervise master's programmes. The ratio is telling: more than half the staff held senior research rank, and a large share supervised graduate students. This is a senior, specialised research body rather than a large teaching faculty. Its size also distinguishes it sharply from the Institute of Law, which counted 105 staff in 2017 across fourteen departments; the international law institute covers the whole of a discipline with four departments because its discipline, though vast in subject matter — every legal relation that crosses a border — has a smaller community of specialists in China, concentrated in a few universities, ministries and this institute.

Public international law and the law of the sea

The Research Department of Public International Law addresses the law governing relations between states and international organisations: the sources and subjects of international law, treaties, territory, jurisdiction, state responsibility, international courts and the peaceful settlement of disputes. The institute's official introduction illustrates the standing of its public international lawyers with concrete posts held by its scholars. Professor Liu Nanlai, an honorary CASS academician, is an arbitrator of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague and has been a consultant to the first, second and third International Law Advisory Committee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Professor Sun Shiyan is a member of the editorial boards of the International Review of the Red Cross and of the Chinese Journal of International Law — the Oxford-published English journal of the Chinese Society of International Law, a different title from this institute's own Chinese Review of International Law. Associate Professor Wang Hanling served as a consultant to the Division for Ocean Affairs and the Law of the Sea of the United Nations Legal Office, and as a special arbitration expert for international fisheries for many years. Law of the sea work of that kind — advising on ocean affairs at the United Nations and arbitrating fisheries questions — sits at the practical heart of public international law for a maritime state, and the candidate record for the institute likewise lists the law of the sea among its research fields, alongside its advisory work on China's participation in international legal affairs and global governance.

Private international law and international economic law

The second and third departments cover the law of cross-border private and commercial life. Private international law — conflict of laws, jurisdiction over international civil and commercial cases, recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments, and the legal problems of persons and companies operating across legal systems — grows in importance as Chinese citizens, students, investors and firms live and trade abroad, and as foreign parties litigate in China. International economic law covers the legal architecture of world trade, investment and finance. The institute's introduction records the advisory footprint of its scholars in precisely this territory: Professor Liu Jingdong is vice president of the WTO Law Research Society of the China Law Society, served from 2015 to 2017 as a deputy division chief of the No. 4 Civil Division of the Supreme People's Court, and is a special consultant to the Supreme People's Court and a member of its first International Commercial Expert Committee. Professor Liao Fan is deputy head of the Committee of International Financial Law of the China Society of International Economic and Trade Law, a member of the Expert Group for the Adjudication of Foreign-related Commercial and Maritime Cases of the Supreme People's Court, and a special observer of Xinhua News Agency. Associate Research Fellow Zhang Wenguang was appointed by the Supreme People's Court in 2015 as a first-batch expert on foreign-related commercial and maritime trials, and in 2018 as a special adviser to its Shanghai International Maritime Judicial Base. The institute has also established a Research Centre for Competition Law, and, in cooperation with the Supreme People's Court, a Belt and Road Judicial Research Base — a pairing that ties its economic law research to the commercial disputes generated by China's Belt and Road trade and investment.

International human rights law, a department of its own since 2009

The fourth department has a documented history of its own. When the Centre for International Law was established in 2002, international human rights law was already one of its important research fields, with its researchers then belonging mainly to the Research Department of Public International Law. In 2009, when the centre was renamed the Institute of International Law, a separate Research Department of International Human Rights Law was established. Its first staff were three researchers — Zhao Jianwen, who headed the department, Liu Huawen and Dai Ruijun — with the institute's director Chen Zexian associated with the department for membership purposes. Qu Xiangfei joined in 2011; in 2012 Liu Huawen moved to the editorial board of the Chinese Review of International Law as deputy editor-in-chief; in 2016 Zhao Jianwen retired and Sun Shiyan and Zhong Ruihua transferred into the department from public and international economic law respectively, Sun becoming acting head in 2016 and head in 2018. The wider context recorded by the institute is that the Institute of Law was the earliest academic institution to carry out human rights research in China, its Center for Human Rights Studies, established in 1994, being described as China's earliest human rights research institution; the international human rights department in the sister institute approaches the subject from the side of international law — treaties, international human rights bodies and cross-cultural human rights dialogue. Liu Huawen, for example, is a member of the Executive Council of the Asian Society of International Law, co-director of the Cross-cultural Human Rights Centre in the Netherlands, editor-in-chief of the Chinese Yearbook of International Law published by the China Society of International Law, and a member of the second and third International Law Advisory Committee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Mo Jihong is associated with the department for membership purposes, and the department's scholarly output spans books, journal and newspaper articles, compilations of materials and a large number of internal reports.

The Chinese Review of International Law and other centres

The institute's own journal is central to its identity. The Chinese Review of International Law was inaugurated in 2014; the institute is responsible for its editorial work and the Social Sciences Academic Press for its publication. Its official introduction records a pointed claim: the Review is the first original Chinese periodical of international law in China with an official registration number for publications. In other words, for all China's international law scholarship before 2014, the field lacked a domestically registered, originally founded Chinese journal of its own, and this institute created it. The journal gives the institute a venue in which Chinese international lawyers publish as a discipline, rather than within general law journals edited elsewhere. Around the four departments and the journal, the institute has built a small set of attached bodies: the Research Centre for Competition Law, the Research Centre for International Criminal Law — a field in which its first director Chen Zexian is vice president of the international society — and the Belt and Road Judicial Research Base established in cooperation with the Supreme People's Court. Together with the shared Law Library of CASS, which serves both law institutes, these centres let a 35-person institute maintain a presence in specialised fields — competition, international crime, Belt and Road adjudication — that might otherwise belong only to much larger institutions.

Graduate training in four fields

The institute teaches as well as researches. Its official introduction states that it has master's, doctoral and postdoctoral programmes in the fields of public international law, private international law, international economic law and international human rights law — that is, one programme line for each of its four research departments. Four of its research fellows supervise doctoral students and fourteen fellows and associate fellows supervise master's students, so graduate training is embedded in the research departments rather than separated into a teaching faculty. For Chinese law, where international law specialists are needed by the foreign ministry, the courts, universities and international organisations, a national institute that both produces the scholarship and trains the next generation of specialists in all four branches performs a double function. Students trained here encounter the discipline as their supervisors practise it: Sun Shiyan moving between the public law and human rights departments, Zhang Wenguang advising maritime courts, Liu Jingdong moving between the institute and a Supreme People's Court division. The institute's students thus enter a field whose Chinese centre of gravity this small Beijing institute substantially constitutes.

Standing at home and abroad, and what makes it distinct

The institute's introduction summarises its scholars as having a high reputation and wide influence at home and abroad, and supports the claim with honours as well as posts. Mo Jihong is lifetime honorary president of the International Association of Constitutional Law; was named one of the National Top Ten Outstanding Young Jurists by the China Law Society; was selected for the National Talents Project and named a Young and Middle-aged Expert with Outstanding Contributions; and serves on bodies including the Academic Committee of the China Law Society and the Supreme People's Procuratorate Expert Advisory Committee. Professors Mo Jihong, Liu Nanlai, Wang Keju, Tao Zhenghua, Shen Juan and Liu Huawen have received the Special Government Allowance from the State Council. Looking forward, the institute states its intention to build a world-oriented academic platform, recruit high-level talent at home and abroad, publish high-quality works reflecting the level of contemporary international law, consolidate its position as the national team of international law research, expand its academic influence, and enhance the discourse power of Chinese international law theory in the world — following, as it puts it, the latest developments in international law and reflecting on new problems and trends in international law practice. For directory readers, its distinctness can be stated plainly. The Institute of Law, its parent and sister, studies China's domestic legal order across fourteen departments. This institute studies the legal order between China and the world, across four. It began in 1959 as a group inside the older institute, spent twenty-four years as a department, seven as a centre, and emerged in 2009 as an institute in its own right — the institutional biography of international law itself in modern China, rising from a corner of domestic legal scholarship to a national institute as China became a global power.