Exporting the Rule of Law to China

While the Society of Jesus, today, is actively reconsidering the aims and methods of missionary work, a number of contemporary professional associations and US government agencies are busily engaged in secular missionary enterprises that, in certain respects, follow the model of the seventeenth-century Jesuits. In this addendum, I discuss briefly, as one example of contemporary missionary work, efforts at exporting the rule of law to China. The aim is not to offer a general discussion of the rule-of-law concept, which has amassed a prodigious literature, or even a detailed review of rule-of-law export projects, which have proliferated since the early 1990s, but rather to highlight three striking similarities to the work of the Jesuits in China—and one crucial difference.