Assessing the development of law in China is a challenging proposition by any standard. One provincial government official I interviewed described current conditions with uncommon eloquence:

He continued:

To be sure, legal development does involve changing minds, and it does demand adjustment and adaptation both by officials and by citizens. Adaptation and adjustment are pressing concerns. But they are not the only, or necessarily even the most important reasons why legal development has not proceeded in the same way or at the same pace across China, up and down the Chinese administrative hierarchy or across the state-society divide.

After thirty years of reform in China, one can legitimately wonder whether individual or local experiences with the Maoist state are still relevant to the lives of ordinary Chinese. The shift to a market economy; the radical transformation of the workplace, housing, consumptions patterns; and countless other aspects of daily life leave few observational clues about the long-term consequences of three decades of Maoism. Few would question the historical importance of the Chinese revolution, but it is incumbent on students of contemporary issues to demonstrate empirically whether nearly one generation after the regime's break from Maoism, individual decisions and beliefs are still decisively linked to these historical events.

As the People's Republic of China (PRC) approaches its seventh decade, we may be even less willing to explore the relevance of the 1949 divide between the so-called “old” and “new” Chinas. Social scientists who conduct survey research in the PRC no longer can interview respondents with living memories of the Nationalist regime. Furthermore, the regime's long-standing emphasis on sharply demarcating the post-1949 political and social landscape from China's historical experience has further weakened interest in exploring whether and how antecedent regimes have had any impact on contemporary mass opinion and behavior. Yet several aspects of China's reform era compel observers to look back in search of explanations that cannot be easily rooted in contemporary institutional or cultural settings.

A major question in the law and society literature is the effect of legal experience on individual attitudes toward legal institutions, in particular the court system. Positive attitudes and confidence in the legal system are important for generating citizen trust and confidence in government generally and also for inculcating citizen values and behavior that support the rule of law and encourage legal (and peaceful) resolution of disputes and grievances more specifically. Thus, these values are important for sustaining democracy. For a country like China, in transition from state socialism, in which legal modes of governance and social control were less common than administrative edicts, Communist Party campaigns, and state repression, attempts to build an effective legal system are also linked to limited political reform. Rule of law building is the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) attempt to build more effective and efficient governance, while making an end run around democratization and the sharing of political power. In this case, creating positive citizen attitudes toward the legal system is part of a strategy to avoid democracy.

In this chapter, we examine how experience with the legal system affects Chinese citizens' evaluation of the courts through a series of comparisons between those who have used the law to resolve an employment dispute and those who have not as well as comparisons between disputants who remained positive and confident in the legal system and disputants who were fully disillusioned and negative.