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.
In Modern China and the West: Translation and Cultural Mediation, the authors investigate the significant role translation plays in the act of cultural mediation. They pay attention to transnational organizations that bring about cross-cultural interactions as well as regulating authorities, in the form of both nation-states and ideologies, which dictate what, and even how, to translate. Under such circumstances, is there room for individual translators or mediators to exercise their free will? To what extent are they allowed to do so? The authors see translation as a "shaping force." While intending to shape, or reshape, certain concepts through the translating act, translators and cultural actors need to negotiate among multifarious institutional powers that coexist, including traditional and foreign. Contributors include: Françoise Kreissler, Angel Pino, Shan Te-hsing, Nicolai Volland, Joyce C. H. Liu, Huang Ko-wu, Isabelle Rabut, Xiaomei Chen, Zhang Yinde, Peng Hsiao-yen, Sebastian Hsien-hao Liao, and Pin-chia Feng.
This open access book opens up the black box of mediation in collective conflicts through the analyses and comparisons of various systems. Mediation and related third party interventions such as conciliation and facilitation are discussed as effective prevention and regulation tools for different types of collective labor conflicts. These interventions fit in a new developed five-phase model of collective conflicts in organizations, going from capacity building in latent conflicts, through conciliation, mediation and arbitration in escalating phases, to rebuilding of trust after hot conflicts. The authors promote understanding and discussion with regards to labor mediation systems, presenting comparative research on the perspectives of mediators and users of mediation. This book describes and analyses laws, regulations and practices of mediation in seventeen countries, with a relative strong emphasis on Europe. Part 1 presents theoretical frameworks on conciliation and mediation in collective labor conflicts. Part 2 presents regulations and practices in 12 European countries: Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, France, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Spain, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Part 3 discusses mediation in these collective conflicts in Australia, China, India, South Africa and the USA. Part 4 offers conclusions and ways forward. This book offers analyses, good practices and developments for third party intervention in collective labor conflicts in global and local changing environments. This book is a must-read for policy makers, , social partners at different levels, as well as scholars and practitioners in industrial relations, human resources management and conflict management, particularly conciliators and mediators.
In recent years, the Chinese legal system on civil litigation, arbitration and mediation, including their respective laws, regulations, and legal institutions, has undergone many changes. These reforms include, for example, three rounds of Reform Plans of the People's Courts (1998-2013), amendments to the Civil Procedure Law in 2007 and 2012, revisions to rules of China's flagship arbitration institution, the China International Economic and Trade Arbitration Commission (CIETAC), in 2005 and 2012, and promulgation of the People's Mediation Law in 2010. This book focuses on the law and development of these three major dispute resolution mechanisms in China, examining the design and legal framework of civil litigation, arbitration and mediation, their operations, challenges, and past-decade reforms. It also explores the wider contextual factors (political, economic, and societal) that led to these developments and looks at the possible obstacles to further development, for civil justice reform in particular and rule-of-law in general. By examining up-to-date literatures while exploring answers to the academic inquiries, this book provides a thorough analysis of the dynamic contemporary Chinese system of dispute resolution that has on the one hand blended Chinese traditions, socioeconomic and sociopolitical realities, guanxi culture and foreign experience, and has on the other hand developed distinctively to respond to China's market and societal transitions. This book will be an invaluable reference tool for students, scholars and practitioners with an interest in Chinese law, dispute resolution, and broader economic and political dimensions of dispute resolution development in China.
Winner of the Science Fiction Research Association Book Award A groundbreaking, alternate history of information technology and information discourses Although the scale of the information economy and the impact of digital media on social life in China today could pale that of any other country, the story of their emergence in the post-Mao sociopolitical environment remains untold. Information Fantasies offers a revisionist account of the emergence of the “information society,” arguing that it was not determined by the technology of digitization alone but developed out of a set of techno-cultural imaginations and practices that arrived alongside postsocialism. Anticipating discussions on information surveillance, data collection, and precarious labor conditions today, Xiao Liu goes far beyond the current scholarship on internet and digital culture in China, questioning the limits of current new-media theory and history, while also salvaging postsocialism from the persistent Cold War structure of knowledge production. Ranging over forgotten science fiction, unjustly neglected films, corporeal practices such as qigong, scientific journals, advertising, and cybernetic theories, Information Fantasies constructs an alternate genealogy of digital and information imaginaries—one that will change how we look at the development of the postsocialist world and the emergence of digital technologies.
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.
Scholarship on early China has traditionally focused on a core group of canonical texts. However, understudied sources have the potential to shift perspectives on fundamental aspects of Chinese intellectual, religious, and political history. Yegor Grebnev examines crucial noncanonical texts preserved in the Yi Zhou shu (Neglected Zhou Scriptures) and the Grand Duke traditions, which represent scriptural traditions influential during the Warring States period but sidelined in later history. He develops an innovative framework for the study and interpretation of these texts, focusing on their role in the mediation of royal legitimacy and their formative impact on early Daoism. Grebnev demonstrates the centrality of the Yi Zhou shu in Chinese intellectual history by highlighting its simultaneous connections to canonical traditions and esoteric Daoism. He demonstrates that the Daoist rituals of textual transmission embedded in the Grand Duke traditions bear an imprint of the courtly environment of the Warring States period, where early Daoists strove for prestige and power, offering legitimacy through texts ascribed to the mythical sage rulers. These rituals appear to have emerged at the same period as the core Daoist philosophical texts and not several centuries later as conventionally believed, which calls for a reassessment of the history of Daoism's interrelated religious and philosophical strands. Offering a far-reaching reconsideration of early Chinese intellectual and religious history, Mediation of Legitimacy in Early China sheds new light on the foundations of the Chinese textual tradition.
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.
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 study analyzes the growing appeal of Tibetan Buddhism among Han Chinese in contemporary China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. It examines the Tibetan tradition’s historical context and its social, cultural, and political adaptation to Chinese society, as well as the effects on Han practitioners. The author's analysis is based on fieldwork in all three locations and includes a broad range of interlocutors, such as Tibetan religious teachers, Han practitioners, and lay Tibetans.
