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Hefa Quanyi: More than a Problem of Translation. Linguistic Evidence of Lawfully Limited Rights in China

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Abstract

This essay addresses the legal meanings of the phrase hefa quanyi (lawful or legitimate rights and interests), an important Chinese legal phrase that is frequently found in many Chinese laws and legal documents, and whose interpretation is claimed by various scholars to affect the alienability of people’s rights. It first challenges the existing translations of the phrase into Italian and English. It secondly delves into its history and etymology, studying the legal meanings that the phrase has had in the various texts of the Constitution of China. It is suggested that hefa quanyi is not the semantic and legal equivalent of Western ‘rights and interests’, but rather that the phrase retains its etymological meaning of ‘power and negatively-connoted profit’. It is further argued that the adjective hefa (lawful) in the phrase is used to impose constraints on the rights and interests that the Chinese people are entitled to.

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Notes

  1. At the time of this writing, the China Judgement Online database retrieves more than 2.5 millions court judgements having at least one occurrence of the phrase [3].

  2. Besides hefa, the subject of this paper, quanyi is used in another Chinese legal usage, bu zhengdang quanyi (不正当权益) that can be translated as ‘proper rights and interests’ and that is addressed in a separate study endorsed by the author. In this essay, when bu zhengdang quanyi appears in the examples, it is literally translated as ‘proper rights and interests’, and its quasi-official translation as ‘legitimate rights and interests’ is hence purposefully omitted and shown by square brackets around ellipsis dots.

  3. Unless otherwise specified, all English translations of Chinese statutory laws in this essay are from Law Info China, the large database of Peking University. Emphasis is the author’s.

  4. For noun compounds in Chinese, see [15].

  5. He (和) is a coordinating conjunction similar to ‘and’ in English.

  6. In Agar’s terminology [17], the ‘languaculture’ is a term meaning that a language does not consists only in grammar and vocabulary, but also past knowledge, habits, and culture—including legal culture.

  7. The other first five collocates identified in the BLaRC corpus are ‘right of appeal’, ‘statutory right’, ‘right to reside under’, ‘civil right’, ‘right to have’. None of these phrases refer to the notion of right and to the meaning implied by hefa, so they cannot be used to translate ‘hefa quanyi’.

  8. For further references in English on the Italian notion of legitimate rights and interests, see also [25, 26].

  9. The birth of the Italian notion of ‘legitimate interests’ traces back to Law No. 2248 of 1865 Attachment E, being it the first element demanding settlement of administrative proceedings to the former Giudice Ordinario (Ordinary Judge). Italian Law no. 5992/1889 founded the 4th Section of the Council of State, and demanded administrative proceedings to a new judge, Giudice Amministrativo (Administrative Judge). This Judge has been deemed competent for any matters involving legitimate interests—as above defined—, rather than to civil and political rights—currently referred to as diritti soggettivi (subjective rights). The notion of legitimate interests then formally entered the 1948 Italian Constitution under articles 24, 103 and 113.

  10. For domestication and foreignization strategy in legal translation, see for instance [30].

  11. Guo Songtao was the first diplomat to live in Europe for an extensive period of time, serving as the Chinese ambassador to England from 1876 to 1879 and to France from 1878 to 1879.

  12. Among the many studies that have been carried out on the application of Sapir-Whorf postulate to colour terms in languages, Berlin, Kay, and Dedrick’s monographs are among the most relevant [39, 40].

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Acknowledgements

This study is part of a 3-year research project on Chinese legal language that I carried out at the University of Perugia, Italy, under the co-supervision of Professor Deborah Cao (Griffith University, Australia), to whom I am deeply grateful for her generous guidance and advice. An earlier version of the paper was presented at a roundtable at the Institute of History and Philology of the Academia Sinica of Taipei in February 2018 during my stay as a visiting scholar. I would like to thank the participants for their feedback and suggestions. The fund Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Perugia (2015–2018), which enabled me to carry out the project in Chinese legal language is also gratefully acknowledged. A special word of thank goes to Professor Ester Bianchi (University of Perugia) for her treasurable support and confidence.

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  1. Department of Literature and Languages, University of Perugia, Via degli Offici, 14, 06123, Perugia, Italy

    Michele Mannoni

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Mannoni, M. Hefa Quanyi: More than a Problem of Translation. Linguistic Evidence of Lawfully Limited Rights in China. Int J Semiot Law 32, 29–46 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9554-0

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