At the beginning of his four-year PhD study, the author frequently felt awkward for being told by his supervisors that this is just what we do in the Netherlands when he invoked China's mainstream academia to criticize the "weaknesses" of Chinese criminal procedure, such as dossier-based proceedings, powerful prosecutors, and activist judiciary. Later on, he found that adversarial dogmas are indeed the "dumplings" in Chinese legal community, and the textbooks on criminal procedure just play a role as the CCTV Gala of the Spring Festival Eve that has misled people into believing that every family will eat dumplings during Spring Festival. Moreover, just like increasing northern Chinese families are beginning to spend Spring Festivals in Hainan, and might eat coconuts instead of dumplings, many exemplary common law countries have indeed deviated more or less from their adversarial traditions, and started to embrace an inquisitorial approach, especially in pre-trial procedure. Accordingly, the author feels obliged to share with his colleagues that just like dumplings do not suit every stomach, adversarial dogmas do not speak to each country. This is just what this book would like to tell in brief.

In a broader sense, the author would like to caution Chinese liberal intellectuals, including himself, against their inherent, and perhaps unconscious, sense of superiority over both the officialdom and the populace, regarding political and legal issues. Such sense of superiority will blind one to what really contributes to the well-being of the country and the people, and drive one fascinated in various "window dressing" reforms rather than functional improvements. They must stop their vain attempts at the so-called "awkward integration", which only leads them from their old-fashioned political correctness to a seemingly more western-styled one, and makes China's law textbooks look like speeches of American village cadres.