Learning to Litigate: the Relationship Between Past Litigation Experience and Litigation Outcomes in the Chinese Intellectual Property System

Intellectual property (IP) and the protection of IP is of increasing importance to firms’ competitiveness, and firms must be able to defend their IP when it is infringed upon. In most markets, IP and the defense of IP is a stringent legal process, but in developing markets and markets undergoing changes, this is not necessarily so. The Chinese IP system and protection is comparatively new, and the system is still under development. In this study, we analyze the relationship between firms’ previous litigation experience and litigation outcomes using a sample of 10,211 court cases tried in China between 2001 and 2009. We find that despite litigation being a rare event for most firms, plaintiffs’ prior litigation experience and especially prior successful litigation experience or experience with specific case types is related to their likelihood of a positive outcome. However, plaintiffs’ successful application of prior litigation experience is contingent on the type of litigation case.

Zhuangzi’s Lone Project of Personal Freedom

This chapter argues that Zhuangzi was an intellectual outlier who was not a significant participant in the debate on humaneness versus justice, carried out primarily among the Confucians, the Mohists, the Laoists, and the fajia thinkers during the classical period. He ridiculed the misguided character of the dominant intellectual projects and warned against their potential for inhumanity and injustice, the very opposite of what is intended by the participants of the mainstream discourse. He extoled personal freedom within the context of overwhelming emphasis on order, structured by humaneness and/or justice, and single-handedly opened up a critical space for the discourse on personal freedom in Chinese intellectual history. However, the marginal nature of the Zhuangist vision of personal freedom did not portend well its prospect in the subsequent Chinese history. The kind of freedom envisioned by Zhuangzi is an effortless navigation through and around the constraints of the human lifeworld, not a reimagining of those very constraints.

Conclusion

The Conclusion offers a reflection on the tragic fate of the Zhuangist idea of personal freedom in Chinese intellectual and political history. It scrutinizes the widely shared premise of self-cultivation, what the author calls the “regime of self-cultivation” in Chinese moral-political philosophy, among most classical thinkers including Zhuangzi, and explores its constraint on the development of personal freedom in the mainstream moral-political discourse as well as in the building of political institutions. In this respect, it was the fajia thinkers who built their theories on the givenness of ordinary human dispositions, instead of on the promissory note of moral transformation. The author reflects on a path that was not taken in Chinese history, i.e., the integration of the Zhuangist idea of personal freedom into the mainstream moral-political project in conceptualizing a polity that can accommodate the ideal of personal freedom institutionally.

Locating Adaptive Agency

Chapter 2 identifies, locates, and disambiguates adaptive agency within the early Chinese textual horizon. It deals with three problems: (1) the notion of adapting is stable, but not always well-delimited or defined; (2) adapting is either expressed through a word cluster or articulated without an attributed term, which makes it more difficult to identify; and (3) adaptive agency must be demarcated from similar notions also pervasive in early Chinese intellectual discourses and their modern scholarly studies. Beyond expounding the philological basis of the research, the section “What Is Not Adapting” clarifies the difference between adapting, flexibility, reliance, balancing, conforming, and spontaneity.

Die Zwei Welten des Zauberbergs: Castorps Transzendenz als „inward transcendence“

Thomas Mann’s Novel, The Magic Mountain, is characterized by the opposition of two distinct worlds. A comparative study of various novels that share the ‘two worlds’ motif demonstrates to us that the existence of the two worlds plays an essential role in the Bildungsroman. The experience with the new possibilities of life at the sanatorium has given Hans Castorp, the hero of The Magic Mountain, the access to the ideal world. Towards the end of the novel, Castorp has denied the material understanding of death, love and disease that constitutes the world of reality and has thus attained an inward transcendence, which, as Ying-shih Yü argues, characterizes the Chinese intellectual world. Mann’s conception of Bildung as pointing to socialization, which is exemplified by Castorp’s transformation, is apparently opposed to the notion of Bildung as individualization. What is implied in Castorp’s integration into the historical context, the war, is far from a failure of the Bildung, but the noblest form of its triumph.

A Few Important Landmarks in the Chinese Debates on Dialectical and Formal Logic from the 1930s

With the rise of the discourse on dialectical materialism in the late 1920s, ideas related to the Marxist notion of dialectical logic started to circulate in the Chinese intellectual world. Not long after the first public discussions on dialectical materialism started to emerge in the early 1930s, the discussants on both sides started to address the question of the Marxist notion of logic and its relationship with Western formal logic. Consequently, over the 1930s, a series of separate public debates ensued, in which dialectical logic contended against the “conventional” forms of logic, such as traditional Aristotelian and modern formal logic. This paper outlines the major landmarks within the public as well as internal Marxist debates on logic in the 1930s. The discussion starts with a general overview of the intellectual background of the debates, and proceeds by analysing the principal developments in them, starting with Ye Qing’s and Zhang Dongsun’s polemic about “dynamic logic” from 1933, and concluding with the internal Marxist discussions on the sublation of formal logic in the last years of the decade.

Bertrand Russell, Fu Tong, and the Emergence of Scientific Secularism in Early 1920s China

In the May Fourth period (1917–1921), the Chinese intellectual world saw the emergence of various forms of secularism, which culminated around the year 1922, when a nationwide non-religious movement was formed. The Western-educated philosopher Fu Tong influenced and contributed to the discourse on science and religion in the early 1920s, and his philosophy of religion served as a conduit for the introduction of Bertrand Russell’s ideas about religion into Chinese public and intellectual discourses. This article establishes a connection between Fu and the lectures on religious belief that Russell delivered in Peking in January 1921 and documents the transfer of ideas from Russell to Fu’s philosophical writings on religion between 1921 and 1922. In its central analysis, the article focuses on Fu’s philosophy of religion and his theory of scientific secularism, which he developed as a critique of the Marxist-led non-religious movement from 1922 onward. The discussion also sheds light on the network of intellectual connections underlying the emergence of the notion of scientific secularism in 1920s China.

US semiconductor measures will hit China’s tech plans

Significance It has evolved from US complaints about Chinese intellectual property and technology transfer practices into a broad-spectrum effort to paralyse the further technological and commercial development of Chinese technology firms, and decouple the US and Chinese IT sectors. Its focus has expanded to include the semiconductor chip industry. Impacts Businesses throughout the semiconductor industry worldwide are becoming caught up in a geopolitical clash. The semiconductor trade shows how a once apolitical sector can quickly become politicised, much as medical equipment has been amid COVID-19. China will seek continued access to non-US foreign technologies through regulation of foreign firms within China. To succeed, China’s semiconductor development projects will need to reduce waste and coordinate their efforts better.