This will be a hybrid event. The Zoom link will be posted.
Abstract
U.S.-China rivalry has increasingly jeopardized the rights and interests of transnational actors whose lives span the two countries. Few are more exposed than the Chinese diaspora in the United States, which has faced heightened discrimination, regulatory scrutiny, and other government actions justified on national security grounds. How do members of the diaspora mobilize law to defend themselves, why have Chinese immigrant lawyers emerged as the principal organizers, and how does their litigation shape the implementation of policies targeting China and people of Chinese origin? Drawing on interviews, digital ethnography, two original surveys, and judicial archives, this article traces diaspora legal mobilization from the successful 2020 challenge to the executive order banning WeChat to its institutionalization in the Chinese American Legal Defense Alliance, which has since contested the China Initiative, state alien land laws, and the termination of Chinese students’ visa status. Litigation, the article argues, transformed dispersed grievances into sustained collective action and generated the organizational capacity, legal consciousness, and institutional infrastructure for successive rounds of mobilization, making the courtroom an overlooked arena of contemporary U.S.-China relations.
Bio
Professor Ji Li is the John S. and Marilyn Long Professor of U.S.-China Business and Law at the University of California, Irvine. His teaching and research span Chinese law and politics, China and transnational legal orders, international business transactions, state–business relations, dispute resolution, the legal profession, and empirical legal studies. He is the author of Negotiating Legality (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and Clash of Capitalisms (Cambridge University Press, 2018), both of which examine how Chinese multinational enterprises, including state-owned firms, adapt to U.S. legal and regulatory institutions. He is currently working on two book projects on China’s interaction with the international legal order and the strategies of transnational legal actors in response to U.S.–China geopolitical rivalry. Professor Li holds a Ph.D. in political science from Northwestern University and a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was an Olin Fellow in Law, Economics, and Public Policy.