History of the Centre of Expertise

The Centre of Expertise for China at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law has a longstanding tradition. Since the 1930s, the Institute – then operating as a Kaiser Wilhelm Institute – has continuously engaged in the study of East Asian law and has steadily expanded this expertise over the decades.

Karl Bünger
From 1934 onwards, Karl Bünger served as the first China specialist at the predecessor Institute. His focus was on the civil and commercial law of the Republic of China, legislative schemes which had just been enacted at that time. In 1941, he went to Shanghai as a representative of the Institute.

Frank Münzel

When Frank Münzel took over the China department in 1969, the isolation of Maoist China meant that the materials necessary for researching modern Chinese law were scarce. Through research stays in the United States, Hong Kong, and Japan, Münzel was nevertheless able to acquire the necessary knowledge. Following China’s opening in the late 1970s, his annotated translations of contemporary Chinese legislation and his critical scholarship laid the foundation for the current engagement of German practitioners and academics with Chinese law.

Further details are available in the tribute published on the occasion of Frank Münzel’s 80th birthday (in German): ZChinR 2017, S. 83 ff.

Knut Benjamin Pißler
Since 2002, Knut Benjamin Pißler has led the China department and developed it into the Centre of Expertise for China and Korea. From October 2023 to September 2025, Pißler served as Deputy Director of the Sino-German Institute for Legal Studies at Nanjing University. Since 2021, he has been Vice-President of the German-Chinese Associate of Jurists (DCJV) and a co-editor of both the ‘Schriften zum ostasiatischen Privatrecht’ and the ‘Schriften zum chinesischen Recht’; he also sits on the editorial boards of the ‘Journal of Current Chinese Affairs’, the ‘China-EU Law Journal’, and the ‘Journal of Chinese Law’ (ZChinR). He is a founding member of the European China Law Studies Association (ECLS).