The New Dual State
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- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- Publication date:
- 23 July 2026
- 13 August 2026
- ISBN:
- 9781009661669
- 9781009661676
- 9781009661645
- Dimensions:
- (228 x 152 mm)
- Weight & Pages:
- 0.516kg, 250 Pages
- Dimensions:
- (228 x 152 mm)
- Weight & Pages:
- 0.365kg, 250 Pages
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Book description
'The New Dual State' examines how regimes can institutionalize judicial autonomy without relinquishing ultimate political control. Revising the dual state theory beyond its classical and contemporary formulations, the book proposes the framework of symbiotic dualism, which argues that the consolidation of political authority can clarify and stabilize the boundary between legal order and extralegal authority, thereby producing a more autonomous judiciary in routine adjudication. Using China as the central case, the book shows how political centralization enabled the regime to insulate judges from local officials, suppress unsanctioned extrajudicial interventions, and channel politically sensitive disputes away from the courts. These measures have produced a legal order in which courts demonstrate increasing professionalism and autonomy in routine cases, while the regime retains decisive authority over politically salient matters. Grounded in extensive fieldwork and framed by comparative legal theory, the book advances a generalizable framework for understanding legality outside the context of liberal democracies.
Reviews
‘More than a study of China's legal system, The New Dual State is an important contribution to comparative constitutional theory, offering a sophisticated and empirically grounded modification of Ernst Fraenkel's foundational work to identify the conditions under which an authoritarian state can create a judicial system that stably decides ordinary cases according to law rather than the rulers' prerogative.'
Mark Tushnet - William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, Emeritus, Harvard Law School
‘Wang Yueduan has already emerged as one of the very best scholars working on China's public law regime. In this volume he turns his formidable analytic powers to the judiciary, elucidating the logic of China's judicial reform while deepening our empirical and theoretical understanding of the dual state. Highly recommended.'
Tom Ginsburg - Leo Spitz Distinguished Service Professor of International Law, Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago Law School
'This is a wonderful book that brilliantly unpacks both the institutional trajectory of the Chinese judiciary and the political logic behind it. Wang persuasively demonstrates how the recent formalization of boundaries between China's ‘normative' and ‘prerogative' states has significantly enhanced the country's institutional durability, while actually bolstering the Party leadership's political control. In that sense, structural segregation of the dual state meaningfully strengthens the functional synergies between its two faces. A major accomplishment.'
Taisu Zhang - Professor of Law, Yale Law School
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