Xiaoqian Hu

Interests

Teaching

Property; Law, State, and Development; Legal Anthropology; China Studies; Rural and Agricultural Studies; Law and Wealth Distribution; Law, Norms, and Conflict Resolution

Research

The connections between property law and societal change, and the limits and responsibility of the state in responding to and shaping such change

Courses

Scholarly Contributions

Chapters

• Tao, Y., & Zhang, Q. (2024). Gender, Vulnerability, and Resilience in Pandemic-Era China. In Routledge Gender Companion to Gender and COVID-19.
• Hu, X. (2023). Vulnerability, Resilience, and the Fair Housing Right. In Law, Vulnerability, and the Responsive State(pp 158-174). London: Routledge. doi:https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003323242
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  The 1968 Fair Housing Act (FHA) is the most important antidiscrimination housing legislation today. It prohibits discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, and national origin in housing provision, transactions, financing, and related services. Building on vulnerability theory, this chapter first argues that the FHA as a law in action is incapable of addressing systemic housing inequity in America and then proposes a reinterpretation of the FHA to enhance its egalitarian capability. Specifically, the FHA as applied by the courts shows excessive deference to defense, creates an illegal immorality vs. legal privilege dichotomy, and consequently harbors an anti-redistribution bias and motivates anti-antidiscrimination resistance. A reinterpreted FHA will benefit from a social-situational view toward harm and discrimination and a reconceptualized resilience state for systemic action. Although the chapter focuses on the FHA, much of the analysis also applies to antidiscrimination law more broadly.

Journals/Publications

• Hu, X. (2019). "Put That Bucket Down!": Money, Politics, and Property Rights in Urbanizing China. Vermont Law Review, 43, 243.
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  As China urbanizes, peri-urban farmland becomes valuable commercial real estate. Chinese property law intends to distribute the increased value of farmland exclusively to the state and corporate entrepreneurs. In response, peri-urban villagers across China seek that wealth by conducting real estate development in direct violation of the law. Building upon fieldwork in one Chinese county (Mountain County), this Article examines how villagers manage to do so and uses this phenomenon to make two interventions in legal studies.First, current law and society literature portrays law and norms either as in competition with each other, or as co-regulators of social relations. This Article seeks to sharpen these general accounts by showing how concrete laws and norms shed the “still mass” of conceptuality and “come alive” in a real-world scenario. I identify four concrete law-norm dynamics: 1. “instantiation,” where laws and norms delineate each other’s meaning in specific instances; 2. “waxing and waning,” where laws and norms reinforce or undermine each other’s effect on human behavior; 3. “transformation,” where laws and norms gradually transform each other’s meaning; and 4. “rule production,” where overtime laws and norms interact to produce new rules.Second, this Article is a close-up study of the more mundane and less draconian manifestations of Chinese authoritarianism. In contrast with the more draconian iterations in which the Chinese state flouts its own laws, or uses law as a weapon to suppress protests and repress large sections of the population, often by violent and arbitrary methods, my fieldwork reveals a slice of Chinese authoritarianism in which local officials and police officers seemed substantially constrained by formal and informal rules, to the extent that they were unable to stop villagers from illegally building commercial real estate. I argue that officials in Mountain County showed restraint in using force in part because instances of local state lawlessness exposed by Chinese media had produced an image of a “violent, land-grabbing state.” This image had eroded the legitimacy of the government and of officials in Mountain County, and showing restraint was officials’ effort to regain some legitimacy in a local society of mutual acquaintance and geographic immobility. Ironically, however, as officials tried to build legitimacy through public compliance with demolition procedural laws, they (or their colleagues) were also undermining their legitimacy-building effort by engaging in the private practice of corruption.
• Hu, X. (2020). Dairy Tales: Global Portraits of Milk and Law. Journal of Food Law and Policy, 16, 1.
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  An introductory article to the special volume, "Dairy Tales: Global Portraits of Milk and Law," describing existing literature on the subject matter; the contents of all the articles in the volume; and the contributions of the articles and of the volume as a whole to the study of the subject matter.
• Hu, X. (2020). “A Glass of Milk Strengthens a Nation.” Law, Development, and China’s Dairy Tale. Journal of Food Law and Policy, 16, 78.
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  Historically, China was a soybean nation and not a dairy nation. Today, China is the world’s largest dairy importer and third largest dairy producer, and dairy has surpassed soybeans in both consumption volume and sales revenue. This article investigates the cultural, political, socioeconomic, and legal factors that drove this transformation, and building upon fieldwork in two Chinese counties, examines the impact of this transformation on China’s several hundred million farmers and ex-farmers. The article makes two observations. First, despite changes of times and political regimes, China’s dairy tale is a tale about chasing the dreams of progress, modernization, and national rejuvenation, even if chasing these dreams would entail cultivating a Chinese taste for milk, collectivizing or privatizing agricultural production, or opening up markets to foreign competitors or adopting a statist industrial policy to help Chinese producers compete on the global stage. Second, China’s dairy tale reveals a lesser-known aspect of China’s tale of globalization and some of its social, economic, and political ramifications. While China is known to have benefited enormously from globalization, globalization also exposed Chinese farmers to systemic income insecurity, job losses, social dislocation, and community disintegration—like farmers in much of the global South and workers in some manufacturing sectors of the global North. My fieldwork in the two Chinese counties seems to indicate some unexpected political consequences of China’s trade opening and some global causes of China’s recent moves toward “hard authoritarianism.” I argue, rather tentatively, that similar to what is happening in many parts of the world, the economic insecurity and social dislocation experienced by rural Chinese citizens may also be creating a welcoming environment inside China for a political strongman and a state-dominated industrial policy, and arguably, for a turn away from (neo)liberalism.

Presentations

• Hu, X. (2023). Social Property. Santa Clara Law School Faculty Workshop. Santa Clara, California: Santa Clara Law School.
• Hu, X. (2023). Social Property. Constructing an Ethical or Moral Approach to State Responsibility. Atlanta, GA: Emory Law School.
• Hu, X. (2022, July). Racial Code Words:A Technology of Racism and Racialization. Law and Society Annual Meeting. Virtual/Portugal: Law and Society Association.