• THE INTERNATIONAL COMMERCE & LAW REVIEW
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• v.49
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• pp.139-164
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• 2011

Traditionally courts have been adopted over the years two standards of dealing with compliance of documents such as strict compliance and substantial compliance and the substantial compliance, which was somewhat less demanding than the strict compliance. However the new guidelines of ICC's international standard banking practice for the examination of documents under documentary credits set up how the UCP is to be applied in practice. The payment obligations of an issuing bank to a beneficiary are independence of the performance or the nonperformance of any contract underlying the letter of credit. However, strictly applying the principle of independence and abstraction could produce unfair results by operating unjustly enrich an unscrupulous beneficiary in case of fraud. Accordingly, when a beneficiary presents complying documents, the issuing bank is bound to honour the presentation unless the fraud rule applies on the facts of the case such as forged or material fraud. If it does, the issuing bank(issuer) needs not pay despite the complying presentation of documents by the beneficiary under the Uniform Commercial Code Article 5-109 and case law in America. However the fraud rule was not addressed in UCP 600. In conclusion, view in terms of legal principle and the court cases is variable and difficult to honour or dishonour the presentation in case of application of the independence principle and fraud rule such as the problems on burden of proof timely, possibility of granting injunction in order to protect against victim for bona fide applicant.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.38
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• pp.191-214
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• 2015

Chinese American Writer, Ha Jin has been writing exclusively about the life in his native Communist China. His stories and poems are almost all about the Chinese people so far. In addition, the distinctive Chinese flavour and the inexorably repressive image of China in his works present an 'Other' to the American culture. Such kind of Chineseness can also be found in Ha Jin's works and his career as a writer. The continued demand for knowledge of China, which is created by China's increasingly important role in the globalized economy, sustains the country's position as an Other for America. In his early four novels, Ha Jin portrays a totally repressive image of Communist China, an image of which functions perfectly as a form of otherness for his American readers. In Ha Jin's portrayal, the Chinese masses are subjected to the Communist authority through its bureaucracy and state-economy mechanism, as well as through the godlike image of Mao Zedong. They are to follow the Communist conscience and subscribe to unity-in-difference. Deviation from the one-party rule is intolerable. In each of the novels, Ha Jin presents a specific system of repression. In In the Pond, confrontation against Party authority is contained by a process of complicity. In Waiting, the Party's power is upheld through a system of surveillance in which people act as agents, resulting in a web of power which paralyses love. The Crazed illustrates a play of power by Party officials which, against the backdrop of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, is full of craze itself, driving people either out of sanity or out of the country. War Trash exposes the Communist power's repression to the extreme by presenting a case of dishonour in those whose life is debased as trash by the Party. The repressive image of China produced in these stories, which span over half a century, makes Ha Jin's China a perfect Other for the West. To sum up, Ha Jin's novels construct a repressive image of China. In his novels, Ha Jin exposes the working of repression in particular systems. Through these systems, he problematizes the notion of personal autonomy for Chinese people and proposes for his western/American readers a solution which eventually turns into a re-presentation of American hegemony.