Translating Weimar

The Cultural Translation of the Weimar Constitution in China (1919-1949)

Fupeng Li

Global Perspectives on Legal History 28
Frankfurt am Main: Max-Planck-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte und Rechtstheorie 2025. XIV, 192 S.
Online version: Open Access (PDF-Download, Lizenz: Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 International)
Print version: 17,33 € (Print on Demand bei ePubli)

ISSN 2196-9752
ISBN 978-3-944773-54-4
eISBN 978-3-944773-55-1

Quotation link of the online version: http://dx.doi.org/10.12946/gplh28

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How can a constitution imagine social revolution? This book answers this question by placing social rights at the center of the Weimar Constitution’s long journey to China. It tells a global legal history of how jurists and legislators used constitutional language to conceptualize 20th-century projects of social transformation.

Moving between Germany and China, the book follows the Weimarer Reichsverfassung as it was read, translated, and rewritten by Chinese actors. Rather than treating the Weimar Constitution’s influence as a simple “reception” of foreign ideas, it reconstructs how Chinese jurists used debates on labor, welfare, and economic order to rethink what a social constitution could be – and what kind of social revolution it might legitimately guide.

At the core of the analysis lies a structural shift: from the Weimar Constitution’s rights-based model of social order to the policy-oriented constitutionalism that came to characterize modern China. Drawing on multilingual archives and constitutional drafts, the study traces how the Weimar Constitution’s catalog of fundamental social rights was progressively reframed as Fundamental National Policies, transforming social rights into state programs, planning targets, and ideological commitments.

Organized around the triad of space, time, and tradition, the book maps the routes by which German Staatsrechtslehre and the Weimar Constitution’s concept of social rights entered Chinese debates, shows how they were positioned within changing temporal narratives of crisis and revolution, and examines how they were negotiated in the encounter with Confucian statecraft, revolutionary nationalism, and socialist planning. In doing so, it offers a new framework for understanding how constitutions mediate social revolution through the cultural translation of rights into policies.

The book will interest scholars and students of constitutional law, global legal history, and modern Chinese history who seek to understand how social rights traveled across borders – and how, in the process, they quietly remade the meaning of both “constitution” and “revolution” in the 20th century.

Contents

XI        Preface

1          Introduction: Perspectives, Questions, and Structure

7          Chapter 1: Reclassifying Legal Knowledge: German Staatsrechtslehre as Intellectual Prelude to the
            Chinese Translation of the WRV

39         Chapter 2: Mapping Each Other: The Embedded Worlds in Compilations of World Constitutions

69         Chapter 3: The Rights-based Model of Weimar

91         Chapter 4: From Translators to Legislators

115       Chapter 5: The Policy-Oriented Model of China: Two Translation Frameworks

153       Conclusion: Translating Weimar through Space, Time, and Tradition

157       Bibliography

171       About the Author