Comparative constitutional law is a thriving field of legal scholarship, and Chinese law is not doing badly either, at least if measured against the rest of comparative law. What is not thriving, however, is the intersection of the two. Scholarly attitudes toward China within the field of comparative constitutional law tend to range from benign neglect to deliberate aversion, the idea being apparently that authoritarian states have nothing worthy of the name “constitutional law” and liberal democracies therefore have nothing to learn from studying them. As Yueduan Wang's book Experimentalist Constitutions demonstrates, this neglect represents a loss for the fields of constitutional law and Chinese law alike, and constitutional law has much to gain from the study of China and authoritarian regimes more generally.

Citation
David S. Law, Book Review: Experimentalist Constitutions (reviewing Yueduan Wang, Experimentalist Constitutions: Subnational Policy Innovations in China, India, and the United States) 261 The China Quarterly 268–270 (2025).