Who Owns the Li Manuscripts?
April 8, 2026
Li Rui was born in China in 1917. He joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1937 and became Chairman Mao’s personal secretary in 1958. After Li Rui publicly criticized Mao and the CCP in 1959, he was sent to jail and work camps for the next twenty years. In 1979, Li Rui was released and reinstated to his prior position as Deputy Minister of the Electric Power Ministry. In 2005, the Guardian described Li Rui as a man who lived a life “filled with rebellions, often at great personal cost, against those who abused their power.” He died in 2019 at the age of 101.
Li Rui kept a diary from 1946 to 2018. The diary—along with a number of other papers he collected during his lifetime—is currently in the collection of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The question of who owns these materials (collectively, the Li Manuscripts) has led to litigation on two continents.
In April 2019, Li Rui’s widow, Zhang Yuzhen, filed a lawsuit in China asserting that she was the owner of the Li Manuscripts. In November 2019, a Chinese court ordered Stanford to transfer these materials to Zhang Yuzhen.
In May 2019, Stanford brought a quiet title action against Zhang Yuzhen in the United States. It sought a declaration that it was the owner of the Li Manuscripts because Li Rui had given these materials to his daughter with instructions to make a permanent gift of them to Stanford. On March 31, 2026, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (Judge Jon S. Tigar) ruled in favor of Stanford in Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University v. Zhang Yuzhen.
In its decision, the U.S. court declined to recognize the judgment rendered by the Chinese court in November 2019. In this post, I first summarize the reasons why that judgment went unrecognized. I then situate the decision in the context of ongoing academic debates about the recognition and enforcement of Chinese judgments in the United States.
Comity
The U.S. court began by observing that the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments is generally governed by state law. Since the Chinese judgment was not a money judgment, the court did not apply the Uniform Foreign-Country Money Judgments Recognition Act. Instead, the court held that the issue of recognition was governed by traditional principles of comity.
In California, the state courts have adopted the test for comity originally set forth by the U.S. Supreme Court in Hilton v. Guyot (1895). That test requires that a foreign country judgment be recognized if there has been:
(a) opportunity for a full and fair trial abroad; (b) trial before a court of competent jurisdiction; (c) trial conducted upon regular proceedings; (d) trial after due citation or voluntary appearance of the defendant; (e) trial under a system of jurisprudence likely to secure an impartial administration of justice between the citizens of its own country and those of other countries; and (f) no evidence of fraud or prejudice in the court or in the system of laws under which the court was sitting or for any other special reason why the comity should not allow the foreign judgment full effect.
Applying these principles to the Chinese judgment, the district court concluded that it should not be recognized.
Non-Recognition
The court identified four reasons why the Chinese judgment was not entitled to comity.
First, the court held that the Chinese court lacked personal jurisdiction over Stanford because Stanford was not identified as a party to the lawsuit until it was over. The only named defendant listed throughout the Chinese proceedings was Hoover. Stanford was added as a defendant, post hoc, at the time the final judgment was rendered.
Second, the court held that even if the Chinese court had personal jurisdiction over Stanford, the judgment should not be recognized because Stanford was denied an opportunity to appear and defend itself. The court noted that two lawyers hired by Stanford submitted papers to the Chinese court authorizing them to act on behalf of the Hoover Institution. These documents had been apostilled by the California Secretary of State and legalized by the Chinese Consulate. Nevertheless, the Chinese judges refused to recognize the validity and effectiveness of these documents because the attorneys had failed to submit Hoover’s registration documents. When the attorneys informed the court that no such documents existed because Hoover was not a separate legal entity from Stanford, the court was undeterred. It continued to demand that the non-existent registration documents be submitted before it would allow Stanford’s lawyers to appear before the court. The practical effect of this decision was to make it impossible for Stanford to mount a defense.
Third, the court held that the judgment should not be recognized because the Chinese court had failed to keep a clear and formal record of the proceedings. It pointed out that the official verdicts database of the Chinese judiciary did not contain any information about the action or the judgment. This lack of any record, the court held, made it impossible for it to determine whether Stanford had been accorded due process.
Fourth, and finally, the court held that the Chinese judgment was not entitled to comity because there was evidence that the proceedings had been influenced by the CCP. In reaching this conclusion, the court credited the testimony of Professor Thomas E. Kellogg, the executive director of the Georgetown Center for Asian Law. Professor Kellogg testified that:
There is a scholarly consensus that the CCP fully controls the Chinese legal system. The CCP uses a number of different methods to assert influence and control over the courts. These mechanisms are duplicative and overlapping, so the CCP can choose which mechanisms to use in any particular case…
The Zhang Action is the type of case as to which the CCP would want to exercise its control over the legal system and to dictate the outcome. The CCP tightly controls information in China to support its version of history and the ideas it wants to promote. The Li Materials present a version of history that is different than the approved party narrative, and the CCP wants to prevent the public from being exposed to that version of history; the CCP also wants to deter others from donating similar materials to Western institutions…
It is not possible to say which mechanisms have been used to dictate the outcome of a given case, due to a lack of transparency in China’s legal and political systems. However, if one looks at the manner in which different elements of the Zhang Action were handled, one can see a clear effort to subvert Stanford’s participation, which is evidence of party interference…
The hearings in the Zhang Action were not open to the public; instead, they were held in the section of the courthouse designated for criminal cases, and the courtroom was guarded by judicial police who kept individuals out of the proceedings. The court clerk noted that the case was being treated with great caution, signaling that the case was politically sensitive. Further, the docket and the papers filed in the Zhang Action are not available online…
In addition to this testimony from Professor Kellogg, the court noted that the 2019 U.S. State Department Country Report on Human Rights Practices in China stated that Chinese judges “regularly receive[] political guidance on pending cases, including instructions on how to rule, from both the government and the CCP, particularly in politically sensitive cases.”
In light of the foregoing, the court concluded that the Chinese judgment was not entitled to recognition in the United States, thereby paving the way for it to conclude that Stanford was the owner of the Li Manuscripts.
Prior Academic Debates
This is not the first time that the fairness of the Chinese legal system has been discussed in a TLB post relating to the recognition and enforcement of judgments.
In July 2022, Bill Dodge authored a post in which he argued that U.S. courts should acknowledge the fundamental adequacy of the Chinese legal system and recognize Chinese judgments unless there is some case-specific ground for non-recognition. In support of this argument, Bill argued: (1) U.S. courts generally lack the institutional capacity to judge the adequacy of foreign legal systems; (2) the State Department’s Country Reports cannot reliably fill the informational gap; (3) holding that a foreign country’s courts are systemically inadequate means that no judgment from that country can ever be recognized and enforced in the United States; and (4) holding that Chinese courts are systemically incapable of producing enforceable judgments will make it more difficult to enforce U.S. judgments in China due to that country’s policy of judgments reciprocity.
In October 2022, Donald Clarke argued in response that although the Chinese legal system is capable of producing fair judgments, the opacity of that system means that, in general, U.S. courts cannot know which judgments are fair. In addition, Clarke rejected the notion that the Chinese government was less likely to interfere in commercial cases than in political cases. He argued that: “There is no line between politically sensitive cases on the one hand and ordinary cases on the other. The same judges appointed through the same process and with the same incentive structure hear both kinds of cases. The same tools for interference exist in both.” With respect to the issue of reciprocity, and the possible adverse consequences for U.S. judgments in China if Chinese judgments go unrecognized in the United States, Clarke was unswayed. Clarke stated that he was more “concerned about defendants having unfair judgments enforced against them [in the United States] than I am about plaintiffs not getting fair judgments enforced [in China].”
In the Stanford case, the district court tacked between these two perspectives. On the one hand, it sounded a distinctly Clarke-ian note when it concluded that the proceedings had been influenced by the CCP. On the other hand, it identified several case-specific issues—such as lack of personal jurisdiction and the absence of a formal record—that are consistent with the grounds for non-recognition identified by Dodge.
Time will tell whether this case is a harbinger of greater skepticism of Chinese judgments on the part of the U.S. judiciary or an outlier that will be distinguished by future courts due to its procedural irregularities and overtly political character.