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| 1 |
ID:
186617
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| Summary/Abstract |
One of the most noteworthy recent trends in judicial reforms worldwide has been the resurgence of lay participation. Several jurisdictions, including Russia, Spain and Japan, have introduced laypersons into their judicial processes. With more than 70 percent of ordinary procedural cases handled by lay assessors, China is a notable, yet severely understudied, example of this global trend. Drawing on descriptive big-data analysis of 23 million court decisions from 2014–2016, this article offers one of the first systematic examinations of the People's Assessor System in China. It identifies a tendency for lay assessors to be used for routine cases without political significance, and the coexistence of an expert model and layman model in everyday justice. Resorting to historical and comparative analysis, we devise a novel typology to explain the China case. The tensions between the competing demands of professionalism and populism during the past few decades has created intriguing contradictions in the system, with the result that lay participation in China both facilitates and constrains judicial decisions.
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| 2 |
ID:
186620
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| Summary/Abstract |
How do cadres provisionally and strategically dispatched from superior governments interact with different rural elites to implement national policy in China? This article examines the case of Targeted Poverty Alleviation (TPA) program to illustrate the mechanism of national policy implementation in rural areas within current China's bureaucracy change and emergence of new elites in villages. Two mechanisms have been detected: the division of work between sent-down cadres and village cadres, and the cooptation of new elites by sent-down cadres. Specifically, the sent-down cadres make use of economic and political resources and institutions to co-opt economic elites and skilled talents that could be seen as new elites in villages during the TPA period. Therefore, this study reveals that the structural change in contemporaty rural China under TPA program affects policy implementation and new elites play a vital role in strengthening national policy implementation. This study contributes to the theoretical knowledge on the rural elites' effect on policy implementation by highlighting the cooptation mechanism of dispatched cadres as an evolution of bureaucracy. This pattern seems to be the "soft intervention" to the Chinese rural society. The findings imply that the state as an adaptive mechanism remains historical legacies in the implementation of state policies.
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| 3 |
ID:
186616
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| Summary/Abstract |
China has been making efforts to reduce the number of executions via a recentralized review process under judicial guidelines. This study analyzes 650 Death Sentence Review Transcripts collected from China Judgments Online, aiming to decipher patterns and variations of death review decisions via descriptive facts and circumstances. We find that marital or domestic violence, offender's guilty conscience or forgiveness by victim's family, and insufficient heinousness underline the disapproval patterns. In contrast, large number of victims or victim deaths, use of weapon, brutal crime nature, being a ringleader in violent crimes, and significant drug weight in drug crimes describe the approval patterns with a general lack of recognition for mitigating circumstances. However, significant variations existed among approved cases, involving defendants who caused a single death for domestic or marital dispute, had no criminal record, committed a crime of passion, or carried low-purity drugs or acted as drug mules. These variations raise the question of whether the Supreme People's Court maintains a consistent standard following its own guidelines.
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| 4 |
ID:
186618
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| Summary/Abstract |
Does soft propaganda work in influencing opinions, and if yes, whose opinions? Soft propaganda promotes pro-regime attitudes in a subtle and sophisticated way. This study examines the effects of carefully framed rhetoric of economic inequality on opinions toward inequality in an officially claimed socialist country: China. Economic inequality is widely perceived as excessive in China. The widening inequality contradicts the official ideology that claims to represent the interests of all Chinese people; therefore, the Chinese government and official media cover the issue of economic inequality carefully. The rhetoric on inequality praises the Chinese government for serving the people and emphasizes the government's policy efforts in reducing inequality. How does this inequality rhetoric affect attitudes toward inequality? With an original survey experiment in the Zhejiang province, this study finds that soft propaganda is effective in influencing low- and high-income respondents but backfires among the middle-income respondents, who view economic inequality as unfair and intolerable after exposure to the rhetoric.
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| 5 |
ID:
186613
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines the ethnic disparity in Chinese sentencing. It argues that the dominant "focal concerns perspective" cannot be fully applied in the Chinese context because of the social control imperative rooted in Chinese politics. Despite the potential for Chinese judges to hold stereotypical views of minorities that may lead to discrimination against them, the need for social control tends to lead judges to favor ethnic minorities to cajole them into obedience. Furthermore, ethnic influence is heterogeneous. Group threat theory posits that sizable groups tend to be treated more harshly to preserve the existing social structure. Albeit this article agrees that sizable focal minority groups are treated differently in China, contrary to that theory it argues that because of the country's Confucian and Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist heritages such groups actually enjoy greater leniency in sentences for non-separatist crimes such as theft. We retrieved data from the China Judgments Online website and compiled a dataset comprising 22,902 theft crime observations in China's five autonomous regions. Using linear regression models, we found that focal minorities indeed enjoy preferential sentencing treatment. The results of this study will not only help researchers to understand ethnic issues in China, but will also benefit the larger community by offering an example of the localization of a Western-rooted theory.
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| 6 |
ID:
186612
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| Summary/Abstract |
For decades, it has remained difficult for Chinese citizens to challenge government decisions through administrative litigation, as local governments control the crucial fiscal and personnel resources of the courts. In 2014, the Supreme People's Court (SPC) announced the decision to allow the newly integrated railway transport courts (RTCs) to accept and hear administrative cases. Unlike the local people's courts (LPCs), the RTCs are under the direct administration of the provincial high courts. Drawing on a unique dataset of more than 238,000 first-instance judgment records between 2015 and 2019, we study whether the RTCs' incorporation into the adjudication of administrative cases has improved Chinese citizens' chances of winning their cases. Our multivariate regression analysis shows that only at the primary level are the RTCs more likely than the LPCs to side with citizens. Moreover, the primary RTCs' pro-plaintiff effect becomes statistically insignificant when the cases concerned are filed against government agencies from higher administrative levels. We also find suggestive evidence indicating provincial governments' implicit influence over the RTCs. Overall, China's experiment of administrative courts has achieved partial success. The RTCs' leverage to evade the capture by local government agencies may remain constrained given their embeddedness in the current Chinese political system.
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| 7 |
ID:
186621
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| Summary/Abstract |
A key means of consolidating the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) ruling basis and enhancing its resilience and political leadership is to establish primary party organizations (PPOs) at the grassroots level. Drawing on the case of the Aixin Social Work Service Center in Jiangsu Province, this article interrogates the rationale and mechanism of party-building in social organizations in China. A concept of "party-building absorption of society" is raised to explore how the "red social worker" is created and trained by the party-state. Four mechanisms are found to be adopted by the CCP to build PPOs in social organizations, i.e., goal-compatibility, co-optation/exclusion, liaison, and competition. It reveals that although the CCP can turn non-government organizations (NGOs) red and reinforce social control and surveillance over them through party-building, it would reshape the state-society relations through transactional governance and may fail to realize social actors' ideological identification with the party.
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| 8 |
ID:
186611
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| Summary/Abstract |
The various transparency initiatives orchestrated by the Supreme People's Court have significantly increased availability of data on the Chinese judiciary. A growing literature has ensued, offering penetrating insights. Our Special Feature aims to make original contributions to this rapidly developing field. It presents key findings from a number of data-oriented projects on the work of China's judiciary, demonstrating the tremendous potential of data-driven research. It also highlights some potential methodological challenges, particularly the issue of data missingness.
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| 9 |
ID:
186615
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines the impact of live broadcast of trials on the behavior of trial participants and court decisions, which is a fundamental question raised by the United States Supreme Court in Estes v. Texas in 1965, but has largely been ignored by the advocates of China's recent initiative to promote and support live broadcast of trials. Using data collected from a court in China, we compare trials with and without live broadcasting. We find that trial participants' rate of speech (average speaking speed measured in words per minute) is slower in the presence of live broadcast, suggesting that they are more cautious. We do not find evidence that live broadcasting influences court decisions or judgments in civil or criminal cases. Our results provide preliminary evidence that live broadcasting makes trial participants more accountable and that it does not influence the fairness of trials.
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| 10 |
ID:
186622
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| Summary/Abstract |
When family-work balance arouses much attention in the modern world, there is increasing interest to understand how job seekers who need to take care of family members experience discrimination in the labor market. This study explores the gendered effects of family care responsibilities on employment outcomes of job candidates in Hong Kong, in the frameworks of market meritocracy and family moral virtuocracy. The authors adopt a mixed-methods research design and find that fathers and caregivers of ageing parents receive favorable evaluations and treatments in the combining power of market meritocracy and moral virtuocracy; mothers are evaluated as possessing market merits but are not favored in job offers. Sub-group analyses and qualitative data further demonstrate that market meritocracy fails to function for virtuous female caregivers in employment opportunities, largely due to structural and cultural barriers in the labor market, instead of stereotypes as often believed. This fundamental inequality needs to be addressed with policy interventions.
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| 11 |
ID:
186614
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| Summary/Abstract |
Earlier anecdotal evidence suggests that judicially-developed doctrines, concepts, principles, norms and practices are disseminated not only downwards, but also upwards and horizontally, among Chinese courts. Methodologically, however, the rejection of the common law notion of precedents by China's civil law tradition has rendered any attempt to quantitatively track the dissemination of legal information an unrewarding exercise. The spread—and citations by mistake—of a non-existent judicial interpretation across all four levels of the Chinese judiciary has offered a rare window into the diffusion of law in China. Our research presents a first quantitative data-based evidence that hierarchical relationships between courts – top down, bottom up and horizontal – are at work in channeling information in the Chinese judiciary, particularly at the basic and intermediate levels. Another original contribution of our research is that it empirically demonstrates the role of cultural and geographical bonds in facilitating the dissemination of information among Chinese courts. Overall, our research provides fresh evidence for the presence of a robust, professional community of Chinese courts and judges, wherein novel laws, norms, information and practices flow and come to influence decision making.
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| 12 |
ID:
186619
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| Summary/Abstract |
Using national survey data collected in 2010, this article explores how affiliation with a work unit (danwei, a public or state-owned institution) discourages people from taking part in popular protest in China. Empirical analysis shows that individuals employed in a work unit or with strong social ties (such as a spouse) to a work unit are less likely to protest. The negative effect of work-unit affiliation on protest participation is so effective that it remains significant even when personal interests are at stake. Further analysis indicates that affiliation with a work unit depresses protest participation both directly and indirectly, which suggests that affiliation status is empowering as well as constraining. In addition to quieting people directly, work-unit affiliation is also associated with a higher social status that empowers people to address their grievances before a protest is called for. Despite the dwindling number of people working in work units, the continuing effectiveness of protest control and the amplifying effect of social ties of those who remain in work units still provide a reliable mechanism for limiting popular protest in China.
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