[author]JI Weidong
[content]
*Written by JI Weidong
1 Chinese path to legal modernization driven by digital technology
The concept of a "digital earth" was first coined by U.S. Vice President Albert Gore in 1998. Ten years later, the development strategy of "Digital China" began to be formulated and implemented. Since 2017, China has proposed a new concept of the "Digital Silk Road", which has not only promoted the cross-border flow of data, but also caused problems and controversies in the international governance of data. The three-year pandemic has greatly expanded the digital coverage of daily life and the application of information technology, and new ways of living such as the metaverse economy, financial technology, e-government, online communities, and blockchain games constitute the main content of the great social transformation. On this basis, in 2023, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council jointly issued the "Overall Layout Plan for the Construction of Digital China", which attempts to continue to promote Chinese path to modernization with digital infrastructure and data resource system as the dual track, and is expected to form a clear advantage in national competition by 2035.
In fact, since the 2010s, the rapid improvement and widespread application of the Internet, big data, and artificial intelligence have also made it seem that China's legal modernization has found an opportunity to find another way. As we all know, the multiple structures of the traditional "rational law" have expanded the discretionary space of justice and law enforcement, and the criss-crossed interaction has weakened the effectiveness and certainty of norms. Under such conditions, to promote the modernization of the legal system, as soon as the independence and specialization of adjudication are emphasized, it is easy to form arbitrary judgments and turn judgments into coercion that lacks legitimacy. As a result, an emphasis on judicial fairness and supervision by public opinion can easily lead to increased external interference in the judiciary -- thus forming a vicious circle of misconduct and repeated cycles. The popularization of information technology in the courts has inadvertently contributed to society's expectations for the objectivity, neutrality and certainty of computer sentencing, resulting in a rare "smart judicial fever" in the world. Generally speaking, AI is essentially a rule-embedded system, which can cause the result of rigid legal norms and technical codification, and prevent external interference in judicial judgment through the whole process of computer systems, which is conducive to strengthening the restraint on state power. In this sense, it can also be said that the analysis and prediction of big data through artificial intelligence systems, as well as more extensive digital processing, are still conducive to the implementation of the modern rule of law spirit that prevents the government from abusing its coercive power.
2 The game between Sovereign Leviathan and the three emerging digital forces
As it turns out, the digital transformation of society does have a somewhat restrictive effect on Hobbes's kind of unlimited government that monopolizes violence and all power in order to get out of the state of "all-man war" - the "Leviathan" (djinn). For example, giant digital platforms have obtained a certain status of "quasi-sovereignty" and "rich and rival country" with the help of state support policies and technological exemptions, and have formed a strong autonomy or dominance through algorithm-boosted methods, which may issue certain forms of digital currency and evade taxes in a certain country, and evaluate, rank, supervise, and jointly sanction online manufacturers and communities. Digital platform giants may even threaten, interfere with, or even limit the country's legislative power to carry out a "constitutional coup" in the digital age: Australia's Mandatory Bargaining Guidelines for News Media and Digital Platforms, passed on February 25, 2021, were forced to compromise and add an arbitration amendment due to Google's outcry and Facebook's pressure to ban the country's media and users from using its news platforms.
Another example is the application of blockchain technology, which transforms the Internet into a decentralized structure without intermediaries and centers, where personal terminals constitute the starting point and arrival point of communication, and can also create a widely used smart contract platform, so that the value enjoyed by individuals in the digital economy can be defined and institutionalized. Here, online users are actually a group of individuals with the right to self-determination, and can even flexibly engage in "sovereign individuals against sovereign states" guerrilla warfare with the help of privacy barriers. In addition, there is generative artificial intelligence, which will be updated rapidly in 2023, due to the machine learning of multi-layer networks, in-context learning, and learning methods, it has largely rendered the pre-given feature design of humans meaningless; Multimodal large models are shaping themselves and evolving into an automated ecosystem that is free from the control of various norms, including intellectual property, to varying degrees, and can directly empower everyone without the need for companies and experts. Therefore, all kinds of large-scale model monsters and artificial general intelligence are bound to pose a serious challenge to the current system of the country.
3 The modern state power revived as an "algorithmic Leviathan".
But on the other hand, we can also see that state power has also re-emerged with the help of digital information technology, and has gained an unprecedented strong position and power, evolving into an "algorithmic Leviathan", which will bring another huge risk and severe challenge to the modern rule of law order designed to constrain government power and protect individual freedom. In the digital age, especially with the continuous emergence of multimodal large models, the contradiction between the black box of algorithms and social transparency has become more and more acute. Imagine a digital nation full of electronic probes and sensors, as if thousands of eyes were flashing, silently scanning and analyzing all phenomena, monitoring people and objects without interruption, and accumulating data for analysis, evaluation, prediction and judgment by artificial intelligence systems. It is not difficult to deduce that where privacy disappears, personal freedom also disappears; However, for such highly specialized and efficient management mechanisms and intelligent legal decisions, it is difficult for the citizens who are the target to participate and be accountable because the algorithms are difficult to understand and explain. Nevertheless, we have to admit that this state of affairs reflects to a certain extent the underlying logic of the modern sovereign state system.
The above-mentioned "trap of sight" realized by digital technology seems to have truly realized the design concept of the Panopticon as "a new form of universal power" proposed by the British jurist and promoter of legal reform Bentham at the end of the 18th century, and it also fully confirms the unique views on the modern state and law expounded by the French social thinker Foucault in the 70s of the 20th century. In Foucault's theoretical vision, we can indeed find another side of the connotation of modern power and the rule of law: surveillance and discipline, unobstructed observation, analysis and meticulous calculation. According to his view, the distinction between rational and irrational creates a space for exclusion, but power can domesticate and discipline individuals without relying on coercion, and govern and boost society; The legal order is essentially a complex of these diverse power techniques and complexes of governmentality, including not only the operation of political institutions, but also the administration of policing in a broader sense, as well as the overall framework and various adjustment mechanisms that determine the interaction between individuals and the government. Although this kind of discourse on understanding the modernization process of the state and law from the dimension of the ubiquitous "great supervision" is not without bias, it does contain profound insights and reflections on certain aspects or dimensions of modernization and its rule of law connotation, which deserves our attention and the enlightenment of drawing lessons and institutional reform.
To sum up, the concept of "digital sovereignty", which is increasingly frequently mentioned, actually contains two meanings, on the one hand, it refers to the risk of national sovereignty being weakened in the digital space, and on the other hand, it implies that sovereignty will take a digital form and be transformed into an "algorithmic Leviathan" to gain new magic. The two are opposites and form a wonderful paradox. It is the latter aspect that requires special attention. The sovereignty of the state, which has become powerful again as an algorithmic Leviathan, sometimes does reign supreme in the world, but more often it melts into the digital network, becoming a piece of programming code that adjusts the interaction relationship, and appears more flexible and boundless. In particular, generative AI dismantles the barriers between language and value, and the multilingual and multimodal working mechanism of large models will naturally promote the interaction between internationalization, globalization and national sovereignty, but this in turn stimulates the sense of identity of the nation-state and the conflict around value alignment.
4 Two legal trial phenomena of algorithmic Leviathan
In response to the current situation of "all models against all models" and the soaring demand for large model computing power, the Ministry of Science and Technology initiated the establishment of a national "supercomputing Internet" consortium on April 17, 2023, connecting a large number of supercomputing centers distributed across the country through the computing network, building a "great unification" computing service platform, and building a national computing base and even a base model through the "supercomputing Internet". On July 7 of the same year, at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, the National Artificial Intelligence Standardization General Group under the guidance of the National Standards Committee announced the establishment of the first large-scale model standardization special group, which was jointly responsible for Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Baidu, 360, Huawei, Ali and other enterprises to officially start the formulation of national standards for large-scale model testing. Obviously, its goal is to promote the combination of large models and standardization, and form a division of labor pattern in which leading science and technology enterprises focus on industry models, the state promotes general models, and creates a new foundation for high-quality development. This line of thinking is not just a cost-effective rational calculation, but it is also clearly conducive to maintaining digital sovereignty, which can further strengthen the power concentration effect of the algorithmic Leviathan and prevent generative AI from getting out of control.
In addition, in response to the guerrilla warfare waged by sovereign individuals hiding in the blockchain against the regulatory system, China has put forward the concept of "sovereign blockchain" based on Guizhou's experience, that is, while maintaining the inherent characteristics of the blockchain such as distribution, immutability, mutual trust, and value transfer through smart contracts, it also injects the will of national sovereignty into it, strengthens government monitoring and technical intervention in on-chain activities, and therefore has the characteristics of non-complete decentralization. According to the conceptual definition made by the National Committee for the Examination and Approval of Scientific and Technological Terms in 2017, a sovereign blockchain is a blockchain based on a distributed ledger, with rules and consensus as the core, and national sovereignty as the premise. Here, rules refer to "code plus law", and consensus emphasizes being oriented to "people" rather than "numbers", and tends to be "polycentric" rather than "decentralized". Judging from the trend in 2023, the "sovereign blockchain" has been considered a symbol of the digital era to continue to promote the modernization of the national governance system, and also constitutes a Chinese solution for the reconstruction of global governance. However, it is also likely that privacy, which is the basis of individual freedom, will eventually have nowhere to hide and be difficult to protect.
5 The Solution: Digital Constitutionalism or Digital Relationalism?
It can be seen that the biggest legal question we face today is, how to prevent the algorithm Leviathan from running wild? Can Enlightenment thinkers and politicians since the late seventeenth century push for "digital constitutionalism" or "digital rule of law" to protect "digital human rights", as Enlightenment thinkers and politicians have done since the end of the seventeenth century to restrain the sovereign rights of the Leviathan by strengthening institutional guarantees of individual freedoms and rights? Or with the help of the existing digital platform giants (such as GAFA composed of Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon in the United States, and BATH composed of Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei in China), sovereign individual guerrillas active in the blockchain, and the combined power of multimodal large models to counterbalance the algorithmic Leviathan, so that cyberspace will return to the pluralistic power structure of the "Middle Ages" in Western Europe or the "indirect control" of the Chinese bureaucracy's "indirectly controlled" township rules and people's contractual-style relationship order? Or combine these two perspectives to innovate the modern rule of law paradigm in the process of transformation of a digital society?
A group of digital platform giants that have risen in the Internet 2.0 era, a large number of virtual communities formed in the Internet 3.0 era, and various general large models in the artificial intelligence 4.0 era all constitute an intermediate group in the digital form, which is more or less similar to the churches, guilds and blood, geography, and karmic communities of medieval Western Europe and imperial China. These intermediate groups can combine beyond the borders of sovereign states and have global influence, while at the same time setting rules for self-government and forming mechanisms for resolving disputes outside the state. For example, the internal rules and regulations of digital platforms and virtual communities include technical standards, algorithms, and codes, which can be sanctioned through points, upgrades, preferential services, material rewards, tax exemptions, digital currency remuneration and voting rights distribution, prohibition of joining groups and voices, removal of web pages, and temporary or permanent bans, and can also be connected to the real-world legal system through purpose trust deeds, legislative negotiations, Internet courts, etc. In fact, the highly autonomous interactive relationships and the rules of the game that crisscross the digital world are the underlying logic that leads to the fundamental transformation of the order principle of the whole society.
6 Turning to a new type of proceduralism: the search for the best combination of law and technology
In such a complex and fluid state, the focus of institutional design is bound to shift from structure to process. In order to prevent the abuse of large platforms and large models through the impartial procedures embedded in AI systems and the separation of powers and checks and balances between different AI systems, and to check and balance the unique algorithmic Leviathan and the privatized power of various algorithms (including the power of AI assistants), the principle of procedural fairness of the modern rule of law should be redefined and play a more important role.
The requirement of procedural fairness in law is well known and refers primarily to institutional arrangements that ensure that argumentative dialogue takes place smoothly and on conditions of freedom and equality. In the digital age, it is also necessary to consider the procedural fairness of data processing and algorithm design and execution, with the goal of addressing how the code and its framework should be properly regulated, who is the author of the code, who can control the author of the code, whether there is a prior or post-facto corrective procedure for the appropriateness of the code, how the powers and responsibilities of the network service provider as an intermediary should be configured, and what kind of regulation should be imposed on the development of software that applies data flows, A series of questions related to the appropriateness of the process, such as whether digital surveillance and web search set restrictive conditions. In a nutshell, the essence of technical due process is to protect the digital rights of individuals through code regulation. If this regulation of code also takes the form of law, then the intersection and combination of technical procedural justice and legal procedural justice can be found. In a certain sense, it can also be said that finding the best combination between the two is the main connotation of the rule of law for the digital state to continue to promote the cause of modernization in the future, and it can also be understood as the starting point of digital constitutionalism or digital rule of law.
An excerpt of the original article was published in the special edition of "2024 China Current Situation Report" of Phoenix Weekly.
Appendix: Transcript of Professor Ji Weidong's lecture on "Frontier Issues in Law" at Kaiyuan Law School
This lecture is the last lecture of the 2023 Frontiers of Law Lecture Course and the first lecture of 2024. At the beginning of the lecture, Professor Ji Weidong extended his cordial New Year greetings to everyone. Subsequently, Professor Ji introduced the theme of the lecture, how to position China's legal system between the intersection of modernization and digitalization.
Introduction: From the story of " Blossom Shanghai" to the question of Weber and Unger's world history
Professor Ji first threw out three basic questions, what is modernization, what is Chinese path to modernization, and what is Chinese path to legal modernization, and gave a simple answer to this question with the complex relationship between Uncle Ye (connecting Shanghai and Hong Kong in the 1930s and 1990s), Mr. Bao (revealing the two wealth codes of foreign trade and stocks), and Miss Shen (spanning inside and outside the system) in the medieval period, Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival and the popular TV series "Blossom Shanghai", pointing out that the modern rule of law is characterized by limiting state power. China's modernization is driven by the state, and this tension and paradox is the key to solving the problem, and it is also the biggest feature of Chinese path to legal modernization.
After introducing the basic concepts, Professor Ji introduced the theme of the lecture with the questions of Weber and Unger. Max Weber was very concerned about China, and he studied Chinese society from the perspective of social structure, first of all, Weber's question: why can't China spontaneously form a modern capitalist system, despite all the external conditions that are very conducive to the emergence of capitalism? Influenced by Weber, Unger made a comparative study of China and Western Europe as typical regions, and then asked Unger the question: Why has the modern rule of law, that is, the universalist, self-directed legal order and the idea of law dominating the state and the individual, failed to take shape in China? After that, Professor Ji introduced various answers, arguments and subsequent explorations to Weber and Unger's questions, and pointed out that the intersection of the two questions is "how to realize the modernization of China's legal system?"
1 The "Law and Modernization" movement that has swept the world and the judicial remedies of subjective rights
Next, Professor Ji Weidong introduced what exactly is the modernization of the legal system, what are the specific contents of its target model, and how to judge and evaluate the modernity of a legal system.
First of all, Professor Ji Weidong introduced Weber's understanding of the modernization of the legal system, as well as the key differences between the traditional Chinese legal order and the modern rule of law in Western Europe. The essence of the modern rule of law, as Weber understood it, is that the state monopolizes violence, but this violence must be justified. It can be summed up in a more concise expression, "just coercion". When it comes to upholding legitimacy, there are two most important factors: fair process and defence counsel. That is, to prevent the abuse of state power by effectively protecting the rights of individuals, so as to enhance the credibility of the state system and legal order. Weber argues that in stark contrast to the design of modern legal systems in Western Europe, traditional Chinese trials are secular, even unusual, irrational due to the influence of the family property system, indistinguishable from administrative management and subject to constant interference by those in power, without formal standards, without lawyers and a professionally trained legal profession, and thus lacking predictability. Weber also noted that the various civil and commercial law (private law) provisions, which are highly valued in Western Europe, are rarely, if any, indirect, in Chinese law, and lack the concept of guaranteeing the right to individual liberty; The ethically oriented family system always pursues substantive justice, rather than formal law. Here, the most critical marker that distinguishes the traditional Chinese legal order from the modern rule of law in Western Europe is whether there is an institutional guarantee of individual "subjective rights".
In addition, Professor Ji Weidong also introduced the hypothesis on rights awareness and litigation activities put forward by the Japanese legal sociologist Takei Kawashima, and the theory on the basic characteristics and goals of the modern rule of law put forward by Mark Garan.
2 Review and reflection on the process, types and key points of the modernization of the Chinese legal system
In this part, Professor Ji Weidong introduced and analyzed the four historical stages or types of China's legal modernization. The first stage is the " reform according to ancient tradition". Because scholars still had a strong sense of pride in traditional culture, it was very difficult to directly promote reform, so the reform according to ancient tradition came into being, and scholars such as Kang Youwei began to cite "Shangshu Hongfan" and "Mencius" to promote legal reform; The second stage is "total westernization". With the failure of the first phase of reform and the rise of the May Fourth Movement, scholars such as Hu Shi and Chen Xujing began to advocate total Westernization, and the authorities began to recognize the advanced nature of modern law in Western Europe. The third stage is the "mass line", which emphasizes the conflict mode of emphasizing "class struggle", the non-professional "mass line" and "mass dictatorship", the "policy law" and "internal documents" that respond to power on the spot, and the "Ma Xi Five trial method"; The final stage is "one country, two systems". After 1979, out of the need to improve the investment environment, China's laws formed a dual structure of internal and external regulations, as well as a "dual-track system" of planning and market competition.
Combined with the proposition of "institutional guarantee of individual subjective rights" mentioned by Max Weber, Professor Ji made a detailed analysis of China's progress in the construction of the rule of law. In this regard, Professor Ji focuses on two core parts: the embodiment of individual subjective rights in China's legal system, and how China implements institutional protection of rights.
In view of the former, Professor Ji analyzed how the subjective rights of individuals are reflected in legal texts in the process of China's rule of law modernization. He pointed out that the formulation of China's Civil Code marks the listing of individual rights, which not only clarifies the boundaries of rights, but also emphasizes the respect and protection of individual rights. Through the analysis of the solutions of Liang Huixing, Wang Liming, Xu Guodong and others, Professor Ji explained how to integrate pluralistic legal doctrines into China's legal framework, and how to deal with conflicts with traditional legal structures. Although the codification of the Civil Code shows the diversity of laws, Professor Ji pointed out that the "subjective rights" of individuals still face the challenges of relativization and mobility in practice. The "subjective right" of the individual still struggles to meet the criterion of predictability of law proposed by Max Weber.
In response to the latter, Professor Ji emphasized that the key to the protection of subjective rights lies in a fair judicial system. However, the lack of credibility and authority of Chinese courts has led to the dilemma of reform, and it seems to have entered a "circle of emphasizing power and mediation".
3 Information technology and full digital coverage have opened up a new way for the rule of law in China
Since 2016, judicial reform has begun to adopt measures such as "two removals", "two systems", "leaving traces" and "going online", trying to build a modern litigation system with trial as the core, strengthen the judicial responsibility system and personnel system, and promote the intelligence of the judiciary. In the contemporary era of rapid development of digital technology, Professor Ji believes that China has made important strides in judicial intelligence. The progress of technology has not only strengthened the rigidity of legal norms, but also enhanced the objectivity and neutrality of judicial judgments, and it seems that some difficult problems in the modernization of the legal system have been solved to a considerable extent.
In this context, at the end of December 2023, the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee and Government jointly announced the "Work Plan on Promoting the Application and Development of Legal Technology in Shanghai", which includes a total of 21 measures in four aspects: open and shared data, deepening the application of Legal Technology, increasing policy support, and strengthening organizational and implementation safeguards. It can be seen that the legal profession has changed dramatically and is completely covered by numbers. Legal AI has created a new type of ecosystem. Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) is becoming more common, and Legal Technology Co. is bound to rise rapidly. This means that in the future, it is possible to give birth to legally tech companies with very distinctive valuations of tens of billions or even hundreds of billions. Alternative Legal Service Providers (ALSPs) will also emerge, including those that provide integrated, toB, toC, and vertical professional services. They inevitably come into conflict with law firms, intending to bypass the law firm and provide legal services directly to their clients. As a result, law firms have had to face diversification and increased investment or use of legal technology, and large law firms have begun to provide clients with related services beyond the law. All this has also led to the reform of legal education.
4 Leviathan's game with the three digital emerging powers and the relativization of sovereignty
Against the backdrop of the above-mentioned digital transformation, Ji Weidong then introduced the concept of the main power of Leviathan and the impact of emerging digital forces on sovereignty. Hobbes referred to the modern sovereign state as a "Leviathan." According to his understanding, a sovereign state is like a container for all power. But the Leviathan, with its unlimited power, is very dangerous for the individual, at least easily suffocating the vitality of innovation. In order to limit the power of the state, Kant believed that the innate rights of the individual should be taken as the cornerstone of justice through the idea of contract and embedded in the framework of the system of state rights.
Since the 1990s, three emerging digital forces have driven a substantial metamorphosis of sovereignty: the rise of online platforms in the 2000s, blockchain applications in the 2010s, and generative artificial intelligence in 2020. First of all, the development of giant digital platforms has acquired a certain degree of "quasi-sovereignty" with the help of state support policies and technological exemptions, and has formed a strong autonomous authority or dominance through algorithm-boosted means. Secondly, the application of blockchain technology transforms the Internet into a decentralized structure without intermediaries and centers, and personal terminals constitute the starting point and arrival point of communication. Here, online users become a group of individuals with the right to self-determination, and can even flexibly engage in "sovereign individuals against sovereign states" guerrilla warfare with the help of privacy barriers. Finally, generative AI, which will be updated rapidly in 2023, is shaping itself and developing into an automated ecosystem, which is free from the control of various norms, including intellectual property rights, to varying degrees, and can skip enterprises and experts to directly empower individuals. To this extent, the various large-scale monsters are bound to pose a serious challenge to the current system of the state in a way that escapes control, and to varying degrees relativizes sovereignty.
5 Unprecedented reinforcing and even absolute sovereignty as an algorithmic Leviathan
In this part, Professor Ji Weidong uses "surveillance" as the key word to explain the strengthening of state power as an algorithmic Leviathan. In the digital age, sovereignty is both relativistic and absolute, and two very different trends coexist and contradict each other, which is the dialectic of history. He mentioned that many people want to find freedom in "cyberspace", but the concept is really about control. In the context of cybernetics, a regulatory directive is a set of codes that transcend legal and community norms. As efficient surveillance systems, they construct a "panoramic surveillance tower" of modern power described by Bentham Foucault in virtual space.
As early as 2018, Canadian professor David Lyon conducted a forward-looking study of the "culture of surveillance", and he proposed that the watcher and the watched form a soft complicity here. In 2019, the pandemic strengthened people's awareness of risk and tolerance and support for a culture of surveillance, and "surveillance" was given an aesthetic and democratic participatory color. In today's post-pandemic era, the analytical framework of "routine and exceptional" and the network structure of mutual surveillance have become the basic features of today's society.
According to Foucault's theory, Professor Ji Weidong pointed out the other side of the connotation of modern power and the rule of law: surveillance and discipline, unobstructed observation, analysis and meticulous calculation. Foucault argues that the distinction between rationality and irrationality creates a space for exclusion, but power can domesticate and discipline individuals without relying on coercion, and promote social governance. And the legal order is, in essence, this multifaceted power craft and its complex of domination. Therefore, the operation of the law is inseparable from power, and at the same time premised on the genealogy of knowledge, including technology.
Professor Ji also analyzed some of the performance of the algorithm Leviathan in reality, especially two very distinctive legal trial phenomena, namely the national supercomputing Internet consortium and the sovereign blockchain.
6 Response to the Algorithmic Leviathan: "Digital Constitutionalism" or "Digital Feudalism"? What is a "digital intermediary group"?
Based on the above analysis, Professor Ji Weidong pointed out that the biggest legal problem we are facing today is how to prevent the algorithm Leviathan from running wild. One feasible solution is to use the combined forces that already exist in reality to counterbalance the algorithmic Leviathan, and return cyberspace to a pattern of decentralization of power and pluralistic checks and balances, similar to the feudal system of the "Middle Ages" in Western Europe, or the "indirect control" of the Chinese bureaucracy. Professor Ji defines this trend or option as "digital feudalism" or "digital relationalism". He also pointed out that the other option is "digital constitutionalism" or "digital constitutionalism", which forms a structure similar to Weber's so-called justified coercion, and rationalizes the institutional design of the digital rule of law. The third path is to combine these two perspectives, based on the dual-track system of checks and balances between Leviathan and digital monsters, and the rule of law, through a combination of legal and technical justice procedures, as well as adequate communication (including human-machine dialogue) to protect digital human rights.
Here, Professor Ji Weidong also emphasizes the digital form of the "middle group", which is quite similar to the various intermediate communities between the individual and the government in medieval Western Europe and imperial China. The concept of "digital intermediary groups" is very innovative, and according to his explanation, it can be seen that these intermediary groups can not only have a global impact, but also establish rules of autonomy and form some kind of autonomous dispute resolution mechanism outside the state. In fact, the highly autonomous interactive relationships and the rules of the game that crisscross the digital world are the underlying logic that leads to the fundamental transformation of the order principle of the whole society.
Professor Ji Weidong further put forward the idea of dealing with the relationship between the state and the digital intermediary group, which can be summarized into three basic models: the consensus model of mutual cooperation between government affairs and information (such as the cooperation agreement between the judiciary and Sesame Credit in the past few years and the joint sanction mechanism between the administrative agency and the platform enterprise), the dictatorial model of the integration of government affairs and information (such as the governance mode of unified data management of local governments, the all-in-one network office, etc.), Dispute patterns in which government and information are separated (e.g. the approach of the EU General Data Regulation). In addition, there are three major issues that need to be addressed, namely: how to prevent the state from being overpowered by the digital constitution, how to prevent the middle group from being the dominant group facing the digital rule of law, and how to reach an appropriate checks and balances between the state and the middle group for digital human rights. These very original insights aroused a high level of interest among the audience.
In the final Q&A session, some students asked Professor Ji for their views on the public-private dichotomy model. Professor Ji analyzed the history and current situation of China, and believed that we need to establish a clear but flexible public-private framework, first of all, to define the subjective rights of individuals (such as property rights) more clearly, and then consider reciprocity and relational adjustments, otherwise we will fall into chaos. In addition, Professor Ji also analyzed the aggregation power of artificial intelligence and the distribution function of blockchain in light of the advent of the digital society, emphasizing the possibility of aligning AI with AI and counterbalancing AI with AI.