In Mediation in Contemporary Chinese Civil Justice, Peter Chan offers one of the most comprehensive analyses of the system of mediation of civil and commercial disputes in contemporary China. Based on extensive interviews with judges and a survey on in-court mediation covering 24 courts in China, the author seeks to answer a question that interests many legal scholars: Is it practically feasible for the mediation of civil disputes in China to take the shape of genuine alternative dispute resolution, rather than being used by the courts as a means to preserve social stability? The book looks beyond procedural rules and examines how judicial culture and beliefs shape the landscape of civil dispute resolution in China.
The culmination of twenty years of research, this essential book completes distinguished historian Philip C. C. Huang's pathbreaking trilogy on Chinese law and society from late imperial times to the present. The author argues that, despite formal adherence to Western law and legal theory, traditional Chinese judicial practices continue to flourish. Huang draws on a rich array of court records and field interviews to illustrate the surprising strength of traditional Chinese civil justice, as can be seen in societal and cadres mediation, and in court actions with respect to property rights, inheritance and old-age maintenance, and debts. Maoist justice too remains influential, especially its divorce and court mediation practices. Finally, despite the recent massive adoption of Western laws, legal reasoning employed in judicial practice has shown stunning continuity, with major implications for China's future.
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.
The book examines the development and application of mediation in China (including Hong Kong). As a popular mechanism for dispute resolution in Chinese history, mediation is believed to be an important process for realizing the official goal of social harmony. Following an overview of the current situation in mainland China and Hong Kong, the book looks into specific legal issues in the application of mediation and the practical use of mediation in specific lines of businesses. The book can serve as an important reference book on the law and practice of mediation in mainland China and Hong Kong for scholars, practitioners, as well as students of mediation and alternative dispute resolution.
As the first volume of a two-volume set on mediation in China, this book examines the legal foundations of Chinese mediation and feasible paths to the institutionalization and professionalization of mediation. Grounded in traditional dispute resolution practices throughout Chinese history, mediation is born out of the Chinese legal tradition and considered to be “Eastern” in nature. The first volume discusses the legal principles that underpin mediation in China, rooted in a legal tradition that pursues the rule of law and morality as well as the concept of harmony in Chinese society. It first revisits traditional notions and models of Chinese mediation and then puts forward approaches to innovating the concept, institutionalization, and mechanism of mediation. The book also discusses how to promote professionalization and special legislation dedicated to mediation in China, thus establishing a mediation system that fits into and is properly tailored for Chinese society. It introduces diverse styles of mediation and social governance in different cultural contexts and demonstrates the effectiveness of China's experience in dealing with a litigious society. This title will serve as a crucial reference for scholars, students and related professionals interested in alternative dispute resolution, civil litigation, and especially China’s dispute resolution policy, law, and practice.
China's ever-expanding commercial influence has attracted global attention on how its civil and commercial disputes are resolved. This compelling new book, Dispute Resolution in China, offers a detailed examination of the elements in the Chinese legal system and the relevant reforms to the multiplicity of approaches to civil and commercial disputes in China today. This book reveals how civil litigation, commercial arbitration, mediation, and their hybrid dispute resolution have distinctly responded to, reformed, and developed in the context of China’s transformational economic growth, societal development, and international interaction in the last two decades. It situates these developments and continued experimentation within a unique hybrid of empirical, contextual, and comparative analytical framework, while paving productive pathways towards the future. This book argues that, rather than being a legal project, China’s civil and commercial dispute resolution system is essentially a social development project, which distinguishes the Chinese approach to civil justice reform from contemporary civil justice movements elsewhere. Among the primary methods of dispute resolution, commercial arbitration in China today uniquely transcending the traditional socio-political constraints, its reform has developed in favor of market-oriented considerations and shaped by China’s socio-economic dynamics and internationalization needs. By contrast, civil litigation and mediation being more instrumentalist in nature, their reform is socio-politically embedded and continues to prioritize social stability. This book also shines a fresh light on comparative assessments of top-down and bottom-up changes in China’s dispute resolution discourse, as well as on how China speaks to international dispute resolution systems. Original and rich in its analysis, this book will be essential reading and invaluable reference tool for scholars with a focus on Chinese law, comparative and international dispute resolution, and on broader legal, institutional, economic, social, political and cultural dimensions of dispute resolution development.
This collection of essays is the result of a collaborative project between Professors Fu Hualing and Michael Palmer, along with scholars in both Hong Kong and mainland China, on the nature and place of mediation in the justice system of the People's Republic of China. The project explores key aspects of the continuing central importance of mediation as a dispute resolution process, the various efforts at the refurbishment of mediation that have been made over the past decade or so, and the reforms that would best enhance the practice, theory and teaching of mediation. Mediation is used in China today for handling disputes in a variety of institutional contexts: 'people's mediation', which is primarily a form of local community dispute resolution, judicial mediation carried out by judges in and around the court, administrative mediation as conducted by officials and often focused on specific areas of governmental responsibility (as, for example, is the case with environment disputes), mediation in arbitral proceedings, and private mediation carried out without specific institutional support. Over the past fifteen years or so, in response to the rapid economic and social changes taking place in mainland China (including, inter alia, a declining importance of the local community) there have been attempts to institutionalize mediation, to resource it better, and to give it more legitimacy and legal force. In handling cases that come before the courts, judicial mediation continues to be seen as a particularly useful process, offering flexibility and effectiveness in dispute resolution (and even in handling serious criminal cases). But at the same time, the widespread reliance on mediation can also mean that dispute negotiations do not take place in the 'shadow of the court' but, rather, in the 'shadow of mediation'. Under the current Xi Jinping government, the Chinese Communist Party's concern with political stability and social harmony has intensified. Even more so now than in the past, China's judges, people's mediators, arbitrators and others have to consider the social and political impact of their dispute resolution work, and to see mediation as a part of a larger scheme of dispute containment.
As the second volume of a two-volume set on mediation in China, this book examines the development of a diversified dispute resolution regime and other major types of mediation in China. Grounded in traditional dispute resolution practices throughout Chinese history, mediation is born out of the Chinese legal tradition and considered to be “Eastern” in nature. This second volume focuses on eight types of mediation prevalent in China in terms of its formation, development, challenges and achievements: people's mediation, court mediation, administrative mediation, industry mediation, commercial mediation, lawyer mediation, online mediation, and a combination of arbitration and mediation. In analyzing these diversified forms of mediation, the authors explain the necessity of integrating emerging forms of mediation with historical ties and traditional practice and thereby reshape a mediation system that incorporates diversified approaches, changing contexts and various dimensions including history and reality, theory and practice, state and society. This title will serve as a crucial reference for scholars, students and related professionals interested in alternative dispute resolution, civil litigation, and especially China’s dispute resolution policy, law, and practice.
This book provides a comprehensive and contextual analysis of the various methods of civil dispute resolution in the PRC. The approach to analysis is historical, comparative and socio-legal.
This book provides an in-depth discussion and introduction to Chinese civil procedure from both a theoretical and practical perspectives, as well as a comparative study of its relevant systems with those of the West. The subject matter of this book is Chinese civil judgments. Judgments, as the final judicial product which affects the legal relationship between both parties or even multiple parties, provide a desirable objects to observe and evaluate the service of judicial proceedings and the protection of the parties' procedural rights. And since judgments are in most cases regarded as the default termination of any civil litigation, there is no need to argue for a comparative study on this topic which has already inspired Chinese doctrines and newest reforms. One of the aims of such research is to modernize Chinese civil justice considering the experience of leading legal counterparts. Next to the theoretical analysis, this book introduces empirical data in China to the English literature, which could provide a vivid illustration for legal researchers to be better informed about the Chinese legal system and its real version of rule of law. In other words, this book likes to describe the real judicial practice in China and summarize how Chinese lawyers understand and facilitate the production of civil judgments. Moreover, this book intends to focus on the adjudicative techniques in the civil litigation, which should constitute the mutual basis of most civil justice. Even there is no well-developed theory under the name of "Adjudicate Techniques" in some jurisdictions, it is not uncommon to discover some principles, methods, institutions, and practical operation, which is functionally and substantially comparable to the ones in other civil justice systems.
