Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Tables and Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Glossary
- Introduction
- PART I LEGAL DEVELOPMENT AND INSTITUTIONAL TENSIONS
- PART II PU FA AND THE DISSEMINATION OF LAW IN THE CHINESE CONTEXT
- 5 The Impact of Nationalist and Maoist Legacies on Popular Trust in Legal Institutions
- 6 Public Attitudes toward Official Justice in Beijing and Rural China
- 7 Users and Non-Users: Legal Experience and Its Effect on Legal Consciousness
- 8 With or without the Law: The Changing Meaning of Ordinary Legal Work in China, 1979–2003
- PART III LAW FROM THE BOTTOM UP
- Conclusion: Chinese Justice from the Bottom Up
- Index
- References
6 - Public Attitudes toward Official Justice in Beijing and Rural China
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2011
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Tables and Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Glossary
- Introduction
- PART I LEGAL DEVELOPMENT AND INSTITUTIONAL TENSIONS
- PART II PU FA AND THE DISSEMINATION OF LAW IN THE CHINESE CONTEXT
- 5 The Impact of Nationalist and Maoist Legacies on Popular Trust in Legal Institutions
- 6 Public Attitudes toward Official Justice in Beijing and Rural China
- 7 Users and Non-Users: Legal Experience and Its Effect on Legal Consciousness
- 8 With or without the Law: The Changing Meaning of Ordinary Legal Work in China, 1979–2003
- PART III LAW FROM THE BOTTOM UP
- Conclusion: Chinese Justice from the Bottom Up
- Index
- References
Summary
Gruesome media accounts from both China and abroad on the performance of Chinese legal institutions, perhaps best exemplified by the Pulitzer Prize–winning series on “ragged justice,” are consistent with scholarly reports of pervasive travesties of justice in the court system and abuses of power in the police system. Notwithstanding this conventional story of endemic failures in China's legal system, survey evidence tells the opposite story: highly positive popular perceptions of – and an overwhelming popular willingness to mobilize – both the courts and the police. Which of these two seemingly contradictory stories is correct? In this chapter, we use survey data from Beijing and rural China on popular perceptions of official justice and on firsthand assessments of encounters with official justice to argue that the story of upbeat perceptions and the story of downbeat encounters paradoxically are both correct.
Our analysis is divided into two steps. First, we analyze general perceptions of the performance of the legal system. Here we consider public attitudes toward, popular confidence in, and popular support for official justice – defined in this chapter as the courts and the police. Second, we analyze personal assessments of direct encounters with official justice. Whereas the first analytical step encompasses all individuals regardless of whether or not they reported prior experience in the legal system, the second is limited to aggrieved individuals who brought their grievances to some part of the legal system.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Chinese JusticeCivil Dispute Resolution in Contemporary China, pp. 169 - 203Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011
References
, “Deep Flaws, and Little Justice, in China's Court System,” New York Times, September 21, 2005, A1
, “Dispute Leaves U.S. Executive in Chinese Legal Netherworld,” New York Times, November 1, 2005, A1
, “Legal Gadfly Bites Hard, and Beijing Slaps Him,” New York Times, December 13, 2005, A1
, “When Chinese Sue the State, Cases Are Often Smothered,” New York Times, December 28, 2005, A1
, “A Judge Tests China's Courts, Making History,” New York Times, November 28, 2005, A1
, “Desperate Search for Justice: One Man vs. China,” New York Times, November 12, 2005, A1
, “Seeking a Public Voice on China's ‘Angry River,’” New York Times, December 26, 2005, A1
, “In Worker's Death, View of China's Harsh Justice,” New York Times, December 31, 2005, A1
, “Dependent Judiciary and Unaccountable Judges: Judicial Corruption in Contemporary China,” The China Review 4, no. 2 (2004): 33–54Google Scholar
, “Mobilizing the Law in China: ‘Informed Disenchantment’ and the Development of Legal Consciousness,” Law & Society Review 40, no. 4 (2006): 783–816CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Unhooking from the State: Chinese Lawyers in Transition” (Ph.D. diss., Dept. of Sociology, University of Chicago, 2003), chap. 9
, “A Slow March to Legal Reform,” Far Eastern Economic Review 170, no. 8 (October 2007): 20–24.Google Scholar
, “The Police Legitimacy Crisis and Police Law Reform in China: Part I,” International Journal of Police Science and Management 6, no. 4 (2004): 199–218Google Scholar
, “Campaign-Style Policing in China and Its Critics.” In Crime, Punishment, and Policing in China, ed. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), pp. 171–188Google Scholar
, “Zhou Yongkang and the Recent Police Reform in China,” The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology 38, no. 2 (2005): 241–253.Google Scholar
, “Zhongguo gongmin quanli yishi de yanjin” (The Evolution of Chinese Citizen Rights Consciousness). In Zou xiang quanli de shidai: Zhongguo gongmin quanli fazhan yanjiu, xiuding ban (Toward an Age of Rights: Research on the Development of Chinese Citizen Rights, Revised Edition), ed. (Beijing: Zhongguo zhengfa daxue chubanshe, 1999), pp. 43–106Google Scholar
and , “Media Effects on Political Confidence and Trust in the People's Republic of China in the Post-Tiananmen Period,” East Asia 19, no. 3 (2001): 84–118CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “The Institutional Diffusion of Courts in China: Evidence from Survey Data.” In Rule By Law: The Politics of Courts in Authoritarian Regimes, ed. and (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 207–234.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
and , “A Comparison of Confidence in the Police in China and in the United States,” Journal of Criminal Justice 29, no. 2 (2001): 87–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Voice, Control, and Belonging: The Double-Edged Sword of Procedural Fairness,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 1 (December 2005): 171–201CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Access to Civil Justice and Race, Class, and Gender Inequality,” Annual Review of Sociology 34 (2008): 339–358.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Legal Needs and Civil Justice: A Survey of Americans: Major Findings from the Comprehensive Legal Needs Study (Chicago: American Bar Association, 1994)Google Scholar
, The Legal Needs of the Public: The Final Report of a National Survey (Chicago: The Foundation, 1977)Google Scholar
, Paths to Justice: What People Do and Think About Going to Law (Portland, Ore.: Hart Publishing, 1999)Google Scholar
and , Paths to Justice Scotland: What People in Scotland Do and Think About Going to Law (Portland, Ore.: Hart Publishing, 2001)Google Scholar
, “Justice from Above or Below? Popular Strategies for Resolving Grievances in Rural China,” The China Quarterly, no. 93 (2008): 52, n. 25Google Scholar
, “Lawyers, Political Embeddedness, and Institutional Continuity in China's Transition from Socialism,” American Journal of Sociology 113, no. 2 (2007): 352–414.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Survey Research in the People's Republic of China: Some Methodological Problems,” Canadian and International Education 16, no. 1 (1987): 191.Google Scholar
, , , , , and , “Observations on the Design and Implementation of Sample Surveys in China.” In Social Transformation in Chinese Societies, ed. , , and (Leiden: Brill), no. 1 (2006): 81–112.Google Scholar
and , “Public Experiences of Police Violence and Corruption in Contemporary Russia: A Case of Predatory Policing?” Law & Society Review 42, no. 1 (2008): 1–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
and , “Lay Expectations of the Civil Justice System,” Law & Society Review 22, no. 1 (1988): 137–161.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994)Google Scholar
, “The Oven Bird's Song: Insiders, Outsiders, and Personal Injuries in an American Community,” Law & Society Review 18, no. 4 (1984): 551–582CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Reading the Landscape of Disputes: What We Know and Don't Know (and Think We Know) About Our Allegedly Contentious and Litigious Society,” UCLA Law Review 31, no. 1 (1983): 4–71Google Scholar
, Praying for Justice: Faith, Order, and Community in an American Town (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986)Google Scholar
, , and , Law and Community in Three American Towns (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994)Google Scholar
, “Managed Participation in China,” Political Science Quarterly 119, no. 3 (2004): 425–451CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Xinfang: An Alternative to Formal Chinese Legal Institutions,” Stanford Journal of International Law 42, no. 1 (2006): 103–179.Google Scholar
, “Climbing the Dispute Pagoda: Grievances and Appeals to the Official Justice System in Rural China,” American Sociological Review 72, no. 3 (2007): 459–485CrossRefGoogle Scholar
and , “Mediating the Mediation Debate: Conflict Resolution and the Local State in China,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 52, no. 5 (2008): 737–764.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Using Law for a Righteous Purpose: The Sun Zhigang Incident and Evolving Forms of Citizen Action in the People's Republic of China,” Columbia Journal of Transnational Law 45 (2006): 14–94Google Scholar
, “Anger Over Rape-Murder Case Sparks Riot in China.” The Washington Post, June 29, 2008, p. A7, 2008
, “Police ‘Killer’ is Chinese Hero,” The Daily Telegraph, August 27, 2008, p. 17
, “Child's Death Highlights Problems in Chinese Justice,” The Washington Post, July 3, 2003, p. A1
and , The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 228, 232–233, 247–249.
and , “The Influence of Traditional Morality on the Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards.” In Yearbook Law & Legal Practice in East Asia 1996, vol. 2, ed. and (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1996), pp. 47, 51Google Scholar
, Bird in a Cage: Legal Reform in China after Mao (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 23Google Scholar
, “Reforming China's Civil Procedure: Judging the Courts,” The American Journal of Comparative Law 45, no. 4 (1997): 793–804CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, The Changing Chinese Legal System, 1978-Present: Centralization of Power and Rationalization of the Legal System (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 166–167Google Scholar
- 37
- Cited by