Erasmus in Madrid? Not interesting enough. Polish law student Bartosz Krysiak decided to spend his semester abroad studying Chinese law in Beijing.
"What is more important? Political rights or social rights?” Professor Xie Libin asks. It is 2 p.m. in the Mingfa building, room 210, at the China-EU School of Law in northern Beijing. Bartosz Krysiak, a 23-year-old exchange student from Poland’s most prestigious institution of higher education, Jagiellonian University in Krakow, frowns. He takes a critical look at the tall, young Chinese professor behind whom China’s guaranteed constitutional social rights glow on a blue PowerPoint presentation: § 42 the right to work, § 43 the right to rest from work, § 44 retirement, § 45 material assistance when old, ill or disabled, etc. “If you had to decide, what would you choose?” Xie Libin inquires. Two rows in front of Bartosz, in a blue shirt and a yellow slipover, Chinese student Yue Peng raises his hand. “Social rights,” he says. Xie Libin nods. “Most Chinese would say so,” he replies and looks at Bartosz. “For Westerners, this may be a strange ranking, but China has long been a very poor country. A job or pension often seems to be more existential than equality, suffrage or freedom of speech and religion.”
30 students from Europe and China are sitting in front of him. Bartosz is one of 18 European students taking the one-semester study programme "Chinese Law Taughtin English” at the China-EU School of Law at the China University of Political Science and Law. From September to January, he delves into China’s Constitutional Law, Business Law, Criminal Law, Administrative Law. The professors, coming from China’s largest law university, the China University of Political Science and Law, also organise visits to law firms and civil and criminal law trials.
Today it is all about the subject of fundamental rights. Professor Xie Libin teaches the course "Comparative Constitutional Law" together with the Distinguished Visiting Professor Susan-Gale Wintermuth. He explains Chinese Constitutional Law, she sheds light on EU Constitutional Law, and then the students compare. "I always emphasise that there is no right or wrong," Wintermuth explains her approach. "Each constitution is only to be understood within its cultural and historical context." Wintermuth is American and teaches winter semesters in Beijing and then in Bilkent in Turkey and in Riga in Latvia for the spring semesters. In the Mingfa building, the lively legal scholar always ensures that the students work in mixed Chinese-Western groups: "In direct interaction, students can best share their ideas.” Bartosz recently discussed law with Katherine from Hamburg in Germany and He Shuang from the Chinese Hubei province.
"Debates in these working groups are very intense," student Yue Peng says. "Chinese and Western ideas differ a lot from each other." He adjusts his round glasses. "It was extremely interesting for me to hear questions like, do you really have fundamental rights in China? At the beginning, the European students often jumped to conclusions, but now they actually check the facts before they judge Chinese law." In China, there are only a handful of universities where young Europeans can study Chinese law taught in English. Whether in a complete, one-year master’s degree or in an exchange semester, it is different from university to university. Depending on the size and location, programmes can cost up to 160,000 yuan, equaling approximately 22,000 euros. The China-EU School of Law is the only school that exempts students from their 13 European partner universities – Autonomous University of Madrid, Central European University in Budapest, Eötvös Lórand University in Budapest, Jagellonian University in Krakow, KU Leuven, Lund University, Maastricht University, Trinity College Dublin, the Universities of Bologna, Hamburg, Manchester and Strasbourg, as well as the Vienna University of Economics and Business – from tuition fees.
"I wanted to have a more meaningful semester abroad than six months of partying, as Erasmus students sometimes do, and I wanted to experience something more exotic than Europe," Bartosz says, while two places next to him his fellow student Michał raises both arms and photographs one of Xie Libin’s slides. Two months ago, for the study programme, Bartosz came to China for the first time. "I am learning a lot about law and life," he takes stock. "For instance, it is one thing to have a constitution, and another how easily citizens can claim their fundamental rights,” he says. “But this is also a question many other nations have to ask themselves.” Bartosz also thinks that he benefits a lot personally from the experience of living in China. "Here, one can overcome many small obstacles by remaining tenacious, such as organising a new room in a dorm." And contact with Chinese students? "Outside of class it is rather limited," Bartosz regrets. "I feel that most of them hesitate to speak English with us because they are afraid of making mistakes." However, some students, such as Yue Peng, are open and talk a lot with their fellow European students. "That is the point when it becomes interesting," Bartosz says.
By Ursula Zipperer
