Legal Challenges in the Age of AI and U.S.–China Relations: A Conversation with Professor Rui Guo
Professor Rui Guo is a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and Harvard Law School. Formerly a professor at the Renmin University of China, Professor Guo directed a leading disability law clinic and taught courses on corporate law and the ethics of artificial intelligence. He has also contributed significantly to China’s AI standardization work, and his scholarship brings together questions of law, technology, and political governance. This interview highlights Professor Guo’s cross-cultural legal experiences, exploring how a comparative understanding of law can illuminate differences across systems and create space for deeper dialogue between countries. It also examines his views on China’s changing corporate and AI governance landscape, as well as the skills he believes the next generation of legal scholars will need in a rapidly changing world.
The interview below was conducted in Fall 2025 and has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Harvard Undergraduate Law Review (HULR): You studied law in both China and the United States. What motivated you to experience legal education in two different systems, and how have these experiences shaped your understanding and perspective of law?
Rui Guo (RG): I first studied law in China at the China University of Political Science and Law. In China, legal education is very tightly intertwined with questions of state-building, economic development, and, of course, social stability. I came to the U.S. with the hope that I would become a legal academic and research these questions. Then, at Harvard Law, I experienced and was exposed to a system that was foregrounded by constitutionalism, individual rights, and a traditional adversarial system. Both systems benefited me because I was able to not only understand what law is in the abstract, but experience and draw from the insights of both systems on how different political orders use law to allocate power, manage social conflicts, and imagine justice. That comparative lens is now central to how I think about issues like corporate governance, AI regulation, and U.S.–China relations.
HULR: On a more apparent level, as you pointed out, China and U.S. legal systems are quite disparate and revolve around different values. However, while you were studying and thinking in both contexts, did any unexpected parallels or areas of connection emerge?
RG: One parallel that struck me came from corporate law. The Chinese system made very visible the instrumental use of law—how legal rules can be used to structure markets, guide social behavior, and implement state priorities. At the same time, that environment made me feel the urgency of rights, procedure, and critical argument, which I then developed more systematically in the U.S. Moving in between these two systems, I think there were certainly some similarities. For instance, when you look at the Chinese corporate code, it’s very much like the Delaware corporate law. However, it is also complicated in that, deep down, they are different. China has an American style corporate law based on very different logic that happens to manifest in very similar legislation and legal terms. Thus, I see law more as a contested field, where political, economic, and moral projects are constantly negotiated, and we need to understand those negotiations.
HULR: Looking back, was there any particular moment or interaction that made you realize the importance of being exposed to law in two different contexts?
RG: There were surely many moments. When I studied at Harvard, I was able to work with some of the leading experts in Chinese law, including Professor Bill Alford, leading legal theorist Duncan Kennedy, and one of the most cited corporate law scholars, Reinier Kraakman. All three of them worked on comparative law, so I was able to stand on the shoulders of giants. They had already developed a very thoughtful theoretical framework of looking at laws in different places, but they did not necessarily share the same political orientations, which was helpful. I now imagine my research being read by people from different fields with different lens, making me alert in understanding that there is no easy answer. That’s one moment.
And the other moment was when I entered into disability law. I never thought I would do disability law because I was always interested in more political-economy structural problems, but the Harvard Law School Project on Disability allowed me to get into the field, and eventually I spent a lot of teaching time on disability law. Disability rights in China is a field that needs to be developed compared to the U.S. Just looking at people with disabilities and everything they experience, you can clearly see a difference. Working in two systems allowed me to see things that I would not have been able to see if I remained in one place.
HULR: As a scholar who is working in cross-cultural legal systems, what role do you see yourself playing in today’s legal environment?
RG: For me, as a legal scholar, I can think of three roles that I play: a translator, a bridge-builder and a critic. As a translator, I try to render the Chinese legal and political system intelligible to scholars and leaders in the U.S. Then, of course, in the Chinese context, within the many years I taught my students and wrote publicly, I also played a role in introducing the legal system and practice of the U.S. and other parts of the world.
As a bridge-builder, I seek to create spaces for scholars, practitioners, and students from different systems to be able to talk about important things. For many years, I taught a class with Professor Alford that brought together Chinese and Harvard Law School (HLS) students. We asked the students to play roles. The HLS students would negotiate on behalf of the Chinese government, and the Chinese students from Remin Law School would represent the U.S. government in disputes like World Trade Organization cases. I think this was very helpful for students to understand different rationale and really address questions in a substantial way.
Finally, as a critic, I examine how law can both enable and constrain power in all systems, not just “other people’s” regimes. My research on Chinese corporate governance, AI governance, and disability rights is in conversation not only with China studies, but also with debates about corporate power and technology in the United States. I hope my work complicates easy moral hierarchies and instead pushes us to ask harder questions about who benefits from legal reforms, whose voices are missing, and how law might be reimagined to better serve vulnerable communities.
HULR: How may law be an effective means for countries to navigate rising geopolitical tensions and gain greater mutual understanding?
RG: Many years ago when I was a student, HLS revised its first-year curriculum and, for the first time in many decades, added a comparative law class and Chinese law class. Sitting in the classroom, I suddenly realized that the kind of questions raised in U.S. legal academia very much stemmed from life in the U.S., as shown in the questions and answers of first-year JD students. That experience made something clear: people do not only disagree about answers; they disagree about which questions are thinkable. In China, many students and much of the public are not exposed to certain kinds of information or debates that are taken for granted in the U.S., and the reverse is also true. Law can help us navigate geopolitical tensions if it becomes a language for making those background differences visible and discussable.
HULR: How has China’s corporate governance landscape changed over the past few decades and how do you view that process of change?
RG: For many years, people thought that China was undergoing a process of market oriented and liberal-democracy oriented reforms and that corporate law was part of that process, as it was one of the fundamental building blocks—in order to have a market you need to have market entities and to build a market entity from a soviet-style central planning system, you need corporate law. That was the conventional wisdom.
My research aimed to provide a different lens. The process of building corporations in China—the so-called corporatization of state-owned enterprises—was never simply about imitating Western multinational firms. It was a political project in which the central government negotiated with local governments, Party organs, and other state actors about how to reorganize control over assets and decision-making. Party committees, corporate boards, and shareholder meetings coexist, but they do not play the same roles they do in a Delaware-style corporation. Stock markets, too, function under different incentives and constraints.
If we assume from the outset that Chinese corporate reform is just a partial or failed imitation of Western models, then features like strong Party committees inside firms or heavy state involvement in key sectors look like anomalies or deviations. But if we understand corporatization as part of a broader Party-state strategy, then Chinese corporate governance appears not as a malformed version of something else, but as the intended product of a distinct political process.
HULR: What do you see as the next major turning point in Chinese corporate governance, and do you see it as being connected to AI?
RG: Yes, very much so. AI is not just another technology; it functions increasingly like a general-purpose infrastructure, similar to electricity or the internet. Any major advance in AI has the potential to reshape entire sectors, from finance to logistics to public services.
In the Chinese context, the most strategically important sectors—energy, banking, telecommunications—have historically been dominated by state-owned enterprises. By contrast, many leading AI firms have emerged as private or quasi-private companies, even if they maintain close ties to the state. That raises a crucial question: how will the Party-state integrate these AI companies into its long-term economic and political strategy without stifling innovation?
At the same time, Chinese AI models are closely tracking global leaders such as OpenAI and Google, while domestic companies like Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, and newer entrants such as DeepSeek are building their own systems. As these models are deployed across finance, social media, public administration, and security, the problem of value alignment becomes central: whose values will guide these systems when they make decisions or recommendations that affect millions of people?
The next turning point in Chinese corporate governance will likely involve two intertwined challenges: designing governance structures for AI-intensive firms that satisfy both market and Party-state expectations, and confronting new responsibilities that corporations have never previously borne—such as managing large-scale algorithmic risks, protecting vulnerable groups from automated harms, and participating in transnational AI governance regimes.
HULR: What role do you see artificial intelligence playing in the future practice of law more generally? In your article “A New Theory of Rights and Boundaries Between the Collective and Individual,” you talk about how AI challenges existing systems of law. Do you think AI will eventually become a fully integrated component of legal processes?
RG: In the article, I use two examples to illustrate legal questions raised by AI agents. One is Comet v. Amazon, a U.S. lawsuit involving an AI-powered browser extension that interacts with Amazon’s platform; the other is the “Alpha Arena” experiment, a crypto exchange where AI agents trade autonomously. Both involve situations where humans and algorithms act together in ways that make traditional categories of responsibility and agency less clear.
Besides how AI challenges existing systems of law, there is also the question of AI’s role in the future of legal practice itself. In China, as early as 2017 and 2018, before ChatGPT, there were already projects of so-called smart courts for online dispute resolution. Beijing had the Internet Court (hu lian wang fa yuan). Alibaba also experimented with a pilot dispute-resolution program that processed more than 90% of small-claim disputes. If AI systems start to take on more judicial or quasi-judicial functions—screening cases, proposing decisions, or resolving routine disputes—we have to ask whether the traditional site of legal authority has shifted. Is law still primarily located in public courts applying publicly knowable rules, or is it increasingly embedded in private platforms and opaque algorithms? AI will almost certainly become more integrated into legal processes, but that integration raises profound questions about legitimacy, transparency, and the very meaning of “legal judgment.”
Law students today are learning at exactly the right time. You’re going to be grappling with some of these very important questions. There is an institutional openness today in that the law is trying to regulate a technology like AI, but the legal system itself is also being shaped by the same technology. As I write in the article, this moment is similar to when Yan Fu translated Mill and coined the modern term “qun-ji-quan-jie,” or the boundary between the collective and the individual. AI is forcing us to rethink these boundaries again, but now in a world where not all actors are human.
HULR: What are the main ethical or regulatory challenges that the rise of AI is bringing to the legal field?
RG: I’ve worked in the past on AI ethical principles, and all these principles apply to different fields and certainly apply to the legal field. But many principles only address specific issues and do not look at the bigger picture. In the article, I talk about the Delta framework and the idea of human flourishing. We need this kind of broader background knowledge when we are thinking about current disputes and challenges. Many of these problems cannot be viewed separately. Even when you think you have solved a problem in a specific case, like Comet vs. Amazon, the issues are not limited to the case itself.
If we are only looking at one dispute, then we are missing what is happening more broadly. For example, the same AI agent that browses an e-commerce website could also be active in a financial market or used in customer service disputes. These are all part of larger structural changes. AI introduces responsibility gaps and shifts in power, because decisions are now made in hybrid human–machine processes. When people focus only on challenges to courts or legal practice, they risk losing sight of the bigger transformation taking place across different fields simultaneously.
The key challenge, then, is not just how courts adapt or how lawyers use AI. The more fundamental challenge is connecting the dots and recognizing that legal concepts—like agency, accountability, and the boundary between individual and collective interests—need updating in the same way that Yan Fu had to invent new vocabulary to match a changing reality. AI is bringing us to a similar moment where legal understanding must evolve to meet technological change.
HULR: Given the growth of AI, what skills do you think are most important for aspiring young legal scholars and practitioners today? What advice would you give pre-law or law students hoping to make meaningful contributions to this field that is constantly changing?
RG: We discussed earlier that comparative and cross-cultural literacy is very important, and that interdisciplinary perspectives are incredibly valuable. In my own work, for example, I engage with what may seem like very different fields—corporate law, disability law, AI, ethics and governance. But the perspectives I gain from moving between different areas help me reach a deeper and more complete understanding.
A third skill is ethical imagination. Law is not just about solving an immediate problem; it is about making decisions that carry weight in people’s lives. It is part of a much larger story that all of us live within, and we need to be able to understand that larger story, which fundamentally requires ethical imagination.
If I could add one final thought, it would be that law is ultimately about formally organizing our deepest disagreements—about power, dignity, and the good life—so that they do not destroy us. In that sense, the rule-of-law ideal has long been understood as a kind of civilizational progress: a movement away from worlds in which politics, factional struggle, or the will of a ruler could rupture everything—markets, families, and the basic stability of social life. The aspiration was that at least some parts of life would be insulated from arbitrary disruption, governed instead by publicly knowable and relatively stable rules that give structure to our shared vision of a good life.
Today, that aspiration is under intense strain. Authoritarian resurgence, U.S.–China rivalry, technological upheavals such as AI, ecological crisis, and widening inequality are not only technical or geopolitical challenges; they raise a fundamental question about whether we can still sustain something like the rule of law, and what it should mean under radically new conditions. Can we rearticulate legal order in ways that reckon honestly with these transformations, rather than merely preserving the shell of past arrangements?
For students, this can feel overwhelming, but it is also a remarkable moment to enter the field. You are not simply inheriting fixed doctrines and institutions; you are stepping into a period where the basic terms of social cooperation are being renegotiated. My hope is that more young legal scholars will see themselves not only as interpreters of existing rules, but as co-authors of new legal frameworks that make it possible to live well together—frameworks that can hold under the pressures of new technologies, shifting geopolitical realities, and changing social expectations, in the United States, in China, and beyond.