Engaging the Law in China presents nine original analyses of Chinese law and society. It addresses issues such as mistreated villagers, disgruntled veterans, discontent pensioners, displaced workers, anticounterfeiting regimes, sympathetic police in situations of social unrest, and profiteering labor camps—all significant topics and hot-button issues for politicians.
China is a very complicated society with an institutional environment drastically different from Western democratic nations. To start, China does not have three separate and independent branches of government—executive/governmental, legislative, and judicial. Instead, the government subsumes legislation and courts, using them as instruments to achieve social control and coordination. Rising above these is the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which oversees and often overrides any rulings with various decisions, measures, and instructions. This structure renders the study of the relation between law and society in China a formidable task. Engaging the Law in China assumes such a task by presenting high-quality manuscripts that investigate various legal mobilization processes and legal institutions in China.
The book contains two sections. The first section focuses on the legal process in which ordinary people mobilize law to redress injustice. The second section explores various legal institutions. The introduction by Diamant, Lubman, and O'Brien depicts a pyramidal schema of legal mobilization processes in China that, despite the outpouring of grievances, result in only a small minority of cases moving to the court filing stage. Such a discrepancy invites serious scrutiny regarding the trajectory factors affecting the legal mobilization process.
In the first section of the book, O'Brien and Li investigate how villagers use the Administrative Litigation Law (ALL) to redress official misconduct and unlawful administrative acts in rural China. The analysis documents major obstacles in each stage of the litigation process. Gallagher shows that despite the common discontent of workers in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) with enterprise reform, the rate of increase in labor disputes for SOE workers is still lower than it is in other enterprises, such as foreign-owned, joint-owned, and private firms. Gallagher points out that SOE workers prefer to use zhao lingdao—talking to the enterprise leader to settle their disputes rather than using other formal methods of mediation, arbitration, or appeals to courts. Frazier analyzes various issues with China's pension reform. He documents that, despite numerous rules and regulations promulgated by the central state, local officials are left with little legal recourse and mostly administrative means such as license suspension and fines to ensure pension funds collection and to sanction delinquent employer contributors. Diamant concludes this section by documenting the difficulty veterans have had establishing livelihoods in the city following their discharges in the 1950s and 1960s. It vividly depicts an irreconcilable situation that baffles veterans: they are touted by the state as national heroes, but treated/mistreated by urban employers as inferior and undesirable workers.
The second section of the book explores legal institutions in China, starting with Mertha's study of China's anticounterfeiting enforcement regime. It documents the differences and growing rivalries between two anticounterfeiting enforcement agencies and how foreign actors use such bureaucratic competition to their advantage. In this section, Tanner shows that despite the post-Tiananmen legislature's manipulation to outlaw mass protests, social unrest is rising, causing police to critically rethink their role in tackling social unrest. Tanner suggests that the police feel they should be more proactive by clearing clogged institutional channels for disgruntled protesters. Fu provides an in-depth analysis of one labor re-education camp (Laojiao). Laojiao institutions have become more economic units than correction facilities, reflecting the dwindling government budget to support penal systems in recent years. Intriguingly, Fu's analyses show that despite the overemphasis on economic purpose in Chinese Laojiao institutions, guards have been nurturing inmates to make them more productive workers.
Engaging the Law in China is conspicuously eclectic, appealing to diverse audiences. Authors from various fields (political science, sociology, and law) use diverse methodologies (participant-observation, in-depth interviews, and archival studies) to pursue their topics. The extensive use of anecdotal materials and the minimal use of jargon make the book highly readable, even for the general public. It is particularly informative for students and scholars interested in the complex interaction between law and society, and how such interaction unfolds in a society distinct from Western legal institutions.
