This book explains the causes, process, and results of group disputes in urban communities (the empirical experiences from Shanghai) in China. It explores the means and characteristics of as well as the differences in conflict resolution in various forms of state–society relations, particularly the ways of dealing with and resolving disputes concerning mass incidents involving government interests in China’s current social transformation period. It also analyzes how people’s mediation organizations interact with the local government when managing and defusing collective disputes. Combining the relevant theories and five conflict resolution measurement models created by Blake and Mouton (1964), this book explains the current interaction model and cooperation mechanism between the state and social organizations in China. To do so, it examines the role of the Lin Le People’s Mediation Workroom in dealing with community collective disputes and the respective action strategies and constraints. The book argues that the current state–social relations in China are not centered on society or the state, but on “state-led social pluralism.”
This volume analyzes whether China's thirty years of legal reform have taken root in Chinese society by examining how ordinary citizens are using the legal system in contemporary China. It is an interdisciplinary look at law in action and at legal institutions from the bottom up, that is, beginning with those at the ground level that are using and working in the legal system. It explores the emergent Chinese conception of justice - one that seeks to balance Chinese tradition, socialist legacies, and the needs of the global market. Given the political dimension of dispute resolution in creating, settling, and changing social norms, this volume contributes to a greater understanding of political and social change in China today and of the process of legal reform generally.
This monograph offers an ethnographic exploration of the local organisation of consumer complaint processing and dispute resolution in the People's Republic of China - now the second largest consumer market in the world - and how the consumer, both ordinary and 'professional', experiences the local system. Drawing on detailed analysis of an impressive amount of empirical data, this book highlights local Chinese understandings and practice styles of 'mediation', as well as identifying a continuing sense of reliance in popular consciousness on the government for securing consumer rights in China. These are not only important features of consumer dispute processing in themselves, but also help to explain the failure of an ombuds system to emerge. By looking at the nature of and issues in China's distinctive consumer dispute resolution and complaints system, and the experiences of consumers with that system, this innovative book illustrates the processes available at the local level giving access to justice for aggrieved consumers and provides a unique contribution to comparative consumer law studies in Asia and elsewhere.
This book explores human dignity, human rights and social justice based on a Chinese interdisciplinary dialogue and global perspectives. In the Chinese and other global contexts today, social justice has been a significant topic among many disciplines and we believe it is an appropriate topic for philosophers, theologians, legal scholars, and social scientists to sit together, discuss, enrich each other, and then deepen our understanding of the topic. Many of them are concerned with the conjuncture between social justice, human rights, and human dignity. The questions this volume asks are: what’s the place of human rights in social justice? How is human dignity important in the discourse on human rights? And, through these inquiries, we ask further: how is possible to achieve humanist justice? This volume presents the significance, challenges, and constraints of human dignity in human rights and social justice and addresses the questions through philosophical, theological, sociological, political, and legal perspectives and these are placed in dialogue between the Chinese and other global settings. We are concerned with the norms regarding human dignity, human rights and social justice while we take seriously into account their practice. This volume consists of two main sections. The first section examines Chinese perspectives on human rights and social justice, in which both from Confucianism and Christianity are considered and the issues such as patriotism, religious freedom, petition, social protest, the rights of marginalized people, and sexual violence are studied. The second section presents the perspectives of Christian public theologians in the global contexts. They examine the influence of Christian thought and practice in the issues of human rights and social justice descriptively and prescriptively and address issues such as religious laws and rights, diaconia, majoritarianism, general equality, social-economic disparities, and climate justice from global perspectives including in the contexts of America, Australia, Israel and Europe. With contributions by experts from mainland China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, USA and Norway, the book provides valuable cross-cultural and interdisciplinary insights and perspectives. As such it will appeal to political and religious leaders and practitioners, particularly those working in socially engaged religious and civil organizations in various geopolitical contexts, including the Korean Peninsula and Japan.
This book aims to make sense of the recent reform of neighbourhood institutions in urban China. It builds on the observation that the late 1990s saw a comeback of the state in urban China after the increased economization of life in the 1980s had initially forced it to withdraw. Based on several months of fieldwork in locations ranging from poor and dilapidated neighbourhoods in Shenyang City to middle class gated communities in Shenzhen, the authors analyze recent attempts by the central government to enhance stability in China’s increasingly volatile cities. In particular, they argue that the central government has begun to restructure urban neighbourhoods, and has encouraged residents to govern themselves by means of democratic procedures. Heberer and Göbel also contend that whilst on the one hand, the central government has managed to bring the Party-state back into urban society, especially by tapping into a range of social groups that depend on it, it has not, however, managed to establish a broad base for participation. In testing this hypothesis, the book examines the rationales, strategies and impacts of this comeback by systematically analyzing how the reorganization of neighbourhood committees was actually conducted and find that opportunities for participation were far more limited than initially promised. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese Studies, Development Studies, Urban Studies and Asian Studies in general.
This book examines facets of popular politics that are, above all, animated by a quest for justice as law, fairness and public virtue. The aim is to better understand how "the political" emerges in the interstices of state law and local moralities. The contributors to the book focus on the interplay between private and public spaces, between morality and law, and between ‘front stage’ and ‘back stage,’ to explore how the common quest for justice, which takes on state slogans but cannot be absorbed by state institutions, changes Chinese society from the bottom-up by creating self-reflective new publics.
Despite contrasting approaches, democratic and authoritarian governments all underline the fact that environmental protection is crucial and inevitable—and China’s enthusiasm in stepping up its efforts to protect the environment has not gone unnoticed. This book highlights how the consensual orchestration of sustainability in China’s biggest city, Shanghai, affects non-state actors’ ways of perceiving, acting, and organizing around environmental issues. China’s Green Consensus examines grassroots realities as they intersect with events of everyday life, offering insights into areas that far transcend debates over coercive forms of environmentalism and exploring the “soft” and “green” facets of President Xi Jinping’s authoritarian approach to governance. The importance of environmental protection in people’s lives serves as a lens to analyze and understand authoritarian adaptations to environmental global phenomena. Arantes highlights how, through mobilization and (de)politicization, a “green” consensus leads to the displacement of state responsibilities and the cultivation of civil society in its own image. In so doing, she opens up new ways of thinking about the complexities of environmental governance, consensus politics, subject making, and citizenship in authoritarian contexts. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Chinese society and politics, environmental politics, political ecology, international relations, and urbanization in Asia, as well as all others interested in the rising appeal of authoritarianism around the globe.
Based on in-depth field research conducted in China between 2019 and 2023, this book raises a concept of “rightful control” and demonstrates a new means of dispute resolution used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) through digital technology and its impact on state-society relations. The author argues that when rightful control relies more on means beyond law and policy, it not only fails to construct an image of a responsible state but also leads to the counterproductive result of creating new conflicts that may bring social instability and threaten regime legitimacy. The study explains why digital technology could only perform a limited role in strengthening social control, which adds a new dimension to state-society relations in China from the perspective of digital governance. The book will attract researchers and students studying law, political science, and sociology, and government personnel who focus on digital governance.
This book provides an overview of the history, basic concepts, and provision models of infrastructure, significant theories on infrastructure economics, practices at home and abroad that reflect the economic development effects of infrastructure, and four infrastructure economic growth models. Great attention is placed on the domestic front. This book describes and discusses in detail the historical background, development trends, achievements, and challenges of China’s infrastructure from 1949 to 2019, under the classic “supply and demand” analysis framework. From the four perspectives of market integration, open development, people’s livelihood, and endogenous growth, this book carries out an empirical study on how to quantify and make causal inferences about the economic development effects of infrastructure. Based on the conclusion that national governance is of important help to infrastructure provision, this book interprets China’s governance system and its impact on infrastructure provision from the angle of decentralization and offers suggestions on policy optimizing.
Criminal reconciliation, a special procedure stipulated in PRC’s 2013 Criminal Procedure Law, allows the alleged perpetrators and victims of certain crimes to resolve criminal cases through reconciliation or mediation. Based on empirical studies on pilot practices of this mechanism in three cities in China, this book argues that criminal reconciliation enables abuses of power and infringement of the parties’ access to justice. This programme further throws light on certain fundamental problems with the wider criminal justice system.
