ABSTRACT
In order to establish a solid legal system, China is attempting to enact various codes and reform the judiciary at a feverish pitch. More concretely, a close examination of legal rationality from the following three angles will assist in analyzing the evolution of law. These are the exclusivity of rights, which is the notion that a right has an exclusive boundary of ownership; the functionality of extralegal norms and the ideological nature of the market-oriented development of law. The chapter finds clues in the parallel processes of Chinese legal development and Japanese legal reform. The foreign enterprises and international financial institutions leading the global market have until been major actors in instigating China's development of law. In the European criticism of globalism, there is a discernable trend of reaffirming the ideal of social democracy amidst the reign of the global market.
