In 2006, in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao foreshadowed that the 21st century could become the �Asian century'.[1]
He was voicing a belief that the world's economic centre of gravity is shifting to Asia, awayfrom the United States of America and Europe,[2] and thatwith this will come greater political, strategic and cultural influence for the nations of the region.
Whether one endorses or dismisses such simplifications or generalisations,[3] the notion of the Asian century has, at its core, an acceptance both within and outside the region that what happens in Asia does matter in the world and that collectively, and individually, the countries of this region have become, or are becoming, significant global players. This book shares the view that the nations of Asia can no longer be seen as operating at the periphery of global power, with their significance confined to economic and commercial matters.[4] The importance of Asia means that Asian law and the role of law in Asia have also become important.We lawyers, especially Western lawyers, tend to overemphasise the role that law plays in development. The early proponents of the �law and development' movement and their predecessors who decades, or even centuries, earlier forced or convinced Asians to �modernise', that is, to Westernise their legal systems, did so with the belief that this would lead to the economic development of Asia. Even though intuitively we know there can indeed be a link between the rule of law and some economic developments, the causal link is hard to prove empirically. Indonesia, which is now more regulated by law than it was under Suharto, has developed less rapidly under the rule of law than it did under Suharto. India, the world's largest democracy, where the rule of law often prevails, has been developing less rapidly than China where the rule of law is a new and only a developing phenomenon. Obviously, law is not the only factor in development, nor is it necessarily always the most important factor.
There is also the fact that the transplantation of Western laws to Asian counÂtries often created a different law altogether - the legal culture in place often reacted quite differently to the Western law than the Western culture did; in other words the local body reacted to the transplant.
The lessons from the past have not always been learnt and the recent imposition of Western-style legal reforms by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) following the 1997 Asian financial crisis often simply made matters worse. Transplants work better when the patient requests, fully consents to and then takes care of their transplant. For example, in Indonesia, the importation of a Western-style bill of rights in the Constitution was the result of vast pressures by the people of Indonesia who did not want a return to the autocratic past. So this transplant has been much more successful than others.Notwithstanding the fact that the law has its limits and cannotsingle-handedly transform societies, nowadays, in all the jurisdictions covered in this book, the governments and the people are convinced that law should be taken seriously and that law and respect for the law do play a role in facilitating progress, whether economical, human or societal, and in ensuring justice and respect for the citizens. And law is indeed taken increasingly seriously by both the citiÂzens and the governments of the jurisdictions under study. There is everywhere debate about what role the law should play, what sources of law should be recogÂnised (indigenous versus foreign laws, secular versus religious laws, local versus national laws) and how law should be implemented and interpreted. This book wants to account for this rising Asian debate about the law and its role in Asian societies.
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