The audacious scope of this book was more a function of my ignorance than the result of an informed scholarly decision. The body of Chinese scholarship on the rule of law is, first of all, voluminous. This can be easily attested at the All Sages Bookstore in Beijing, which features a seemingly never-ending array of thought-provoking interventions into the debate on the rule of law and legal thought, more generally. After I had learned enough Chinese to appreciate this fact, I also realized that Chinese legal scholars do not write in a vacuum but instead engage closely with global legal theoretical debates. Understanding these global debates is a precondition for understanding the interventions in the Chinese debates on the rule of law. Soon it also dawned on me that many Chinese legal scholars use language suggestively and against a background of implicit, contextual local knowledge. This adds yet another layer of complexity to the interpretation of Chinese scholarship on the rule of law. In the background to all of this is the question of traditional (or traditionalist) Chinese thought and its possible influence on contemporary Chinese legal discourse. And it goes without saying that understanding scholarly arguments about the rule of law is only a small step toward saying something relevant about the subject of the debate itself, the rule of law. This creative practice is the goal of Chinese rule of law scholarship, and to do justice to this scholarship one should set one's goals equally high.

Fortunately, I was able to speak with thirty Chinese legal scholars who were generous with their time and helped to make the project somehow manageable. I will not thank all these scholars here, as I did not obtain permission from many of them to be associated with this book. I must also emphasize that the scholars discussed in this book did not read this manuscript or sign off on my interpretations of their texts. I apologize to these scholars if I have not grasped the meaning of their scholarship, or if they feel that my emphasis is somehow wrong. Any mistakes in this book are solely my own fault.