Hi, I just want to try and answer your question regarding “ foreign-related rule of law work”.

I was at a academic conference yesterday, and one scholar mentioned the following: that Chinese officials are quite explicit in the goal to transplant parts of their legal system to other countries, much like previously countries have based some of their new laws or even entire legal systems on common / civil law examples, Chinese officials are hoping to influence the legal developments of other countries too now.

So what they do is make a list of countries that they think could be open to accepting parts of Chinese law, i.e. when they want to write a new law, they look to the Chinese law as inspiration or take it over almost whole-sale. These countries are often also BRI-affiliated countries in Africa or the Middle East.

They have a list of these countries, and each country gets a ranking based on whether they are interested in only the BRI-related money or have shown interesting in taking over / using Chinese law as inspiration for the development of their own legal system.

When I heard this, I had to think of XJP's speech and your question, Mr. Bishop. Now, I'm sure the puzzle is much bigger than this, but I hope to have provided at least one piece to solving it.

There's also a very interesting academic paper by Susan Trevaskes on Rule of Law rhetoric and how to interpret it. She argues that the CPC is embedded itself into the state-apparatus through the use of law and regulations, so laws are the glue that keeps party and state tightly together so that the state apparatus will become a much better vehicle for implementing party policy.

I see the same developments in my own work related judicial reform and technological innovation in court practice. While most of this automation and digitisation has many positive externalities of transparency, efficiency, etc. Their most important purpose is to:

- provide better judicial services so that courts can fulfil their political tasks as governance institutions better. - have more control over local court practice.