Introducing two new co-bloggers

It’s my pleasure to welcome two new co-bloggers here: Ling Li and Nils Pelzer.

Ling is a Lecturer in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Vienna, where she has also served as a visiting professor during 2015-2016. She obtained her doctoral degree from Leiden University Law School in the Netherlands in 2010. Prior to her PhD study, she taught various courses on Chinese law at the Northwest University of Political Science and Law in China. Between 2010 and 2015, she worked as a senior research fellow at the US-Asia Law Institute of New York University School of Law and remains as a non-resident fellow of the same institute. Her main area of research interest is Chinese politics and law with a particular focus on the institutional features and development of the Chinese Communist Party. Her research focuses on questions such as how the Party regulates itself and what the power dynamics are within the Party and between the Party and other institutional actors. She has published extensively on corruption and anti-corruption in China and Chinese political-legal institutions.

Nils is a lawyer at Thümmel, Schütze & Partner in Stuttgart, Germany. He works at the firm’s China desk and advises clients in the areas of commercial law and litigation. Before joining legal practice, he was a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for Procedural Law. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Heidelberg and also holds a bachelor’s degree in Asian studies. Nils spent several years in Asia working in Mainland China, Hong Kong and Singapore and was a visiting scholar at Shanghai Jiaotong University in 2014. He is also a part-time lecturer for Chinese law at the University of Trier. The focus of his research is on dispute resolution, legal history, and general civil law in China.

As someone whose legal training and teaching experience is exclusively in common-law jurisdictions, I look forward especially to the different perspectives that Ling and Nils will bring to Chinese legal issues.