Teng Li

  • Fellowship year:2015-2016
  • University: Northwestern University
  • Dissertation Topic/Category: China
  • Dissertation Title: At Crossroads: Reconstruction of Property Rules and Legal Culture in Early Post-WWII Taiwan and Northeast China, 1945-1952
  • This dissertation studies the de-Japanization and reconstruction of property law in Northeast China (Manchuria) and Taiwan after World War II.  Focusing on the tumultuous period of 1945-1952, it underscores the role property law played in the rise and fall of regimes, and embodies the process legal cultures adapted on the soil of Taiwan and Northeast China throughout the era concerned.

    This project contends that, during the process of bringing these two regions out of the shadow of Japanese influence, the Communists and Nationalist were in the same postcolonial situation, struggling between maintaining their anti-Japanese stance and selecting certain colonial legacies to further their own agenda.  Neither political party operated in a legal vacuum; their regulatory framework, to a certain point, resembled each other because of the shared past of, and similar challenges across, the two areas.