This is contribution #4 in our series SMART COURTS AND SMART GOVERNANCE IN CHINA, outcome of our workshop in July 2025 at Cologne University.
Picture a prosecutor in Shanghai opening their computer to review a theft case. Instead of manually searching through thousands of precedents, they turn to an AI system that instantly analyzes the evidence and recommends similar cases from a database of millions. Within minutes, the system suggests whether to detain the suspect and even predicts the likely sentence. This isn’t science fiction anymore, it is the reality of China’s “206” system, arguably one of the most ambitious experiments in AI-assisted criminal justice worldwide.
The Rise of Smart Justice in China
Since 2016, China rapidly embraced what it calls “Smart Justice” (智慧司法), integrating artificial intelligence throughout its legal system. The Shanghai “206” system represents one frontline pioneer of this transformation. Unlike AI applications in “Western” courts that focus on specific tasks like risk assessment, China’s system attempts something far more comprehensive: it assists judges and prosecutors across the entire criminal process, from pre-trial detention decisions to sentencing recommendations.
What makes this particularly fascinating is not just the technology itself, but the institutional context. China’s judicial system, operating without the constraints of judicial review traditions found in many “Western” courts, has adopted AI technologies with remarkable speed and minimal resistance. The AI-assisted system now processes hundreds and thousands of cases annually, with the “206” system expected to be utilized in all criminal cases in Shanghai.
How Does It Actually Work?
The “206” system’s core feature is its Similar Case Recommendation function, which operates like a sophisticated legal search engine on steroids. When a prosecutor inputs case details, the system uses deep learning algorithms trained on past verdicts to identify patterns and recommend outcomes. It considers over 50 variables, from the suspect’s employment history to whether victims have forgiven the accused, to generate sentence recommendations.
The system does not just help with individual decisions. For example, in plea leniency cases (which now account for 87% of criminal cases in China), prosecutors may display the AI’s predictions to negotiate with defendants. “Look,” they might say, “based on our AI system, you’re likely facing 3-5 years of imprisonment. If you plead guilty now, we can recommend the lower end according to the law.” The system has changed the dynamics of criminal justice negotiations.
The Good, The Bad, and The Algorithmic
Our research, building on exclusive data from Shanghai’s procuratorate, reveals a complex picture. On the positive side, the data suggest genuine improvements: cases processed with AI assistance took 23% less time to complete, and sentencing recommendations made with AI support were accepted by judges 75.8% of the time, whereas they only accepted 65.6% of the sentencing recommendations without AI support. The system appears to reduce arbitrary detention and increase consistency in sentencing.
However, three critical concerns emerged based on our fieldwork. First, the anchoring effect: when prosecutors see the AI’s recommendation first, it becomes incredibly difficult for them to deviate, even when case specifics might warrant a deviation from the recommended sentence. Once the prosecutor sees the recommended number on the screen, she or he ascribes a sometimes unwarranted authority to it.
Second, accountability avoidance: the system’s complexity creates a perfect excuse for passing the buck should errors occur in sentencing. If something goes wrong, was it the algorithm’s fault? The fault of the system developer? The fault of the prosecutor or judge who relied on the system? This diffusion of responsibility poses serious challenges to China’s judicial accountability reforms.
Third, and perhaps most troubling, is the compression of the rights to a proper defense. Defense lawyers have no access to the system, cannot challenge its algorithms, and often do not even know that it is being used. While prosecutors wield sophisticated AI tools funded by public money, defendants and their lawyers are left in the dark. This to some extent amplifies the already existing problems of an unequal playing field in criminal justice.
Lessons for the Global Legal Community
What can the rest of the world learn from China’s bold experiment? First, procedural design matters more than technological sophistication. Our research suggests that many of the risks associated with AI in criminal justice are not inherent to the technology but arise from how it is implemented. Simple procedural safeguards, like requiring judges to form initial opinions before consulting AI, or ensuring that the defense has access to algorithmic tools, could mitigate many concerns.
Second, transparency isn’t optional. The closed nature of China’s system, where algorithms operate as black boxes hidden behind claims of trade secrets of technology providing companies, undermines procedural justice. Any jurisdiction considering adopting AI for prosecution or adjudication work must grapple with balancing technological innovation with fundamental legal principles like the right to a fair defense.
Finally, China’s experience confirms a widely observed paradox: AI systems designed to reduce human bias and increase consistency may actually entrench existing patterns of injustice if they are trained on historical data reflecting those very biases. The algorithm does not innovate; it replicates and amplifies patterns that have previously manifested.
Looking Ahead
As courts worldwide grapple with backlogs and inconsistencies, China’s aggressive adoption of AI offers both inspiration and cautionary tales. The technology clearly has potential to improve efficiency and consistency in criminal justice. But our research suggests that without careful attention to procedural safeguards, transparency, and equal access, AI applications risk creating a two-tiered system of justice where algorithmic efficiency trumps fundamental fairness. The question is not whether AI will transform criminal justice, but whether we can design systems that harness AI’s benefits while preserving the procedural protections that define justice itself.
The full article titled Access to technology, access to justice: China’s artificial intelligence application in criminal proceedings can be accessed here.
Wanqiang (Aiden) Wu is a Yat-sen Postdoctoral Fellow at Sun Yat-sen University Law School. He received his Ph.D. in Criminal Procedure Law (Cum Laude) from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2025. His research focuses on criminal procedure, empirical legal studies, and the intersection of technology and criminal justice in China. He has published extensively on China’s procuratorial system and judicial reforms in leading journals including Modern China, Hong Kong Law Journal, and International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice.Contact him via email.
Xifen Lin is Professor of Law and Vice Dean at KoGuan School of Law, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Professor Lin is a leading scholar in Chinese criminal procedure and judicial reform, with particular expertise in prosecutorial systems and empirical legal studies.Contact him via email.
This is contribution #3 in our series SMART COURTS AND SMART GOVERNANCE IN CHINA, outcome of our workshop in July 2025 at Cologne University.
Imagine a researcher seeks to answer a fundamental question of legal fairness: Do better-resourced parties (the “haves”) achieve more favorable outcomes in Chinese courts simply because of their socio-economic status?
A naïve answer is to compare the win rates of well-resourced and less-resourced parties in litigation. But the researcher might quickly realize that well-resourced parties are likely to be represented by counsel whereas the less-resourced are likely to be self-represented. Perhaps it is the quality of legal representation that influences how judges rule, not the status of the parties. On this account, the “haves” do better than the “have nots” because they have, among other things, superior legal representation.
A solution might be to control (or adjust) for legal representation. It is common for statistical studies to control for an explanatory variable to isolate the effect of the variable of interest on outcomes. Controlling for legal representation here means, essentially, that the “haves” who are represented by counsel are compared to the “have nots” who are represented by counsel. These comparisons seem to make sense: if the researcher finds that represented, well-resourced parties still win more than represented, less-resourced parties, that indicates that status is driving the observed pattern of outcomes.
This approach can result in inaccurate inferences being drawn due to collider bias. In causal modeling, a collider is a variable that is a common effect of two other factors. A classic, non-legal example is the car that fails to start. This can be caused by a dead battery or an empty gas tank.[1] These two causes are independent; one doesn’t cause the other. Suppose you only look at cars that have broken down, i.e. you condition on the collider “car fails to start”. Then a correlation appears between the two causes: if you know a broken-down car has gas, you can be confident the battery is dead. But of course, the car having gas is not itself a cause of the battery being dead.
So how does collider bias apply to our example of the “haves” and “have nots” in Chinese courts? There is suggestive evidence that Chinese litigants are more likely to seek professional advice in harder, more doubtful, cases.[2] So, if a well-resourced party has a lawyer, it could be because they can easily afford one or because the merits of their claim are doubtful. If a less-resourced party has a lawyer, it is probably because the merits of their claim are doubtful. If a researcher controls for legal representation, she is comparing the “haves” who are represented by counsel are compared to the “have nots” who are represented by counsel. But the “haves” who are represented by counsel have, on average, stronger cases on the merits than the “have nots” who have counsel, and they might therefore prevail in more cases. The researcher may conclude from her controlled comparison that the “haves” come out ahead more often in Chinese courts because of who they are. But this inference is not necessarily warranted by the evidence.
This example demonstrates that big data does not absolve legal scholars from thinking through the causal relationships between the variables in their analyses. Indeed, qualitative and sociological methods can produce valuable domain knowledge for distinguishing plausible relationships from spurious ones. A multi-disciplinary paradigm remains critical to studying the Chinese legal system, even in the era of artificial intelligence.
The full article, titled Data Still Needs Theory: Collider Bias in Empirical Legal Research, co-authored by Xiaohan Yin, is available here. Benjamin Minhao Chen is Associate Professor and Director of the Law and Technology Centre at the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law. You can contact him via email.
[1] Judea Pearl, Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann 1988).
[2] Wenzheng Mao and Shitong Qiao, ‘Legal Doctrine and Judicial Review of Eminent Domain in China’ (2021) 46 Law & Social Inquiry 826; Yali Peng and Jinhua Cheng, ‘Ethnic Disparity in Chinese Theft Sentencing’ (2022) 22 China Review 47
This is contribution #2 in our series on SMART COURTS AND SMART GOVERNANCE IN CHINA, outcome of our workshop in July 2025 at Cologne University.
In our daily lives, there’s an app for almost everything—ordering food, tracking fitness, managing work. But what if there was an app for political loyalty? For the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), this isn’t a hypothetical question. It’s a core part of its strategy for governing in the 21st century. Through a massive initiative known as “Intelligent Party Building” (智慧党建), the CCP is rolling out digital platforms to manage, educate, and discipline its 95 million members.
My research explores how this digital push is reshaping the very nature of power within the Party. It is not just about efficiency; it is about deepening control. The Party aims to achieve two seemingly contradictory goals at once: build a more modern, responsive bureaucracy while simultaneously reinforcing absolute top-down authority. This creates a new, powerful dynamic of internal governance in the digital age.
The Two Faces of State Power: An Iron Fist and a Nervous System
Despotic Power: This is the “iron fist”—the state’s ability to make decisions and issue commands without negotiation. It’s top-down, coercive, and absolute. Think of it as power over society.
Infrastructural Power: This is the state’s “nervous system”—its actual capacity to penetrate society and carry out its plans. It relies on logistics, institutions, and technology to get things done. It is power through society.
Historically, regimes were often strong in one of the types of power but weak in the other. For example, an ancient empire might have immense despotic power (the emperor’s word is law) but weak infrastructural power (it is hard to actually collect taxes in a remote province). Modern democracies often have strong infrastructural power (efficient services) but weak despotic power (leaders are constrained by law and public opinion).
The CCP under Xi Jinping, however, is trying to maximize both. “Intelligent Party Building” is a prime example of this ambition, using digital tools to build a highly efficient administrative nervous system that also serves a powerful iron fist.
Inside the “Party-Building Cloud Platforms”
So, what do these apps and platforms actually do? While they vary locally, they generally focus on four areas:
Digital Dossiers and Performance Tracking: The traditional paper dossier (dossier), a lifelong file tracking a person’s political behavior, is going digital. These platforms create a permanent, tamper-proof record of a member’s participation in Party activities. Poor performance can trigger warnings, public criticism, or even negative entries in their file that could impact their career.
Ideological Education on Demand: The platforms deliver a constant stream of ideological content. This includes live-streamed lectures, articles from state media, and materials from official education campaigns. To ensure engagement, members are often tested with gamified quizzes where they can earn points and compete on leaderboards.
Gamifying Loyalty: The platforms borrow heavily from popular apps to keep users engaged. For instance, the famous “Study the Great Nation” (学习强国) app rewards users with points for reading articles about Xi Jinping or watching videos of his speeches. This subtly transforms political indoctrination into a daily habit, much like checking social media.
Digitizing Bureaucracy: Beyond ideology, these platforms are also practical office tools. They handle routine tasks like paying Party fees, managing announcements, and approving leave requests. By integrating with daily work, they ensure the Party’s presence is not just a separate political activity but is embedded into the fabric of everyday professional life.
A Double-Edged Sword of Digital Control
The true innovation here is not the technology itself—many of these features mimic existing corporate collaboration tools like Ding Talk or WeChat Work. The innovation lies in its dual-use application for political control.
The very same feature that enhances infrastructural power (e.g., efficiently collecting data to provide personalized educational content) is used to wield despotic power (e.g., using that same data to monitor and punish members for insufficient engagement). A tool designed for convenience also becomes a tool for surveillance. A gamified quiz that makes learning “fun” is also a mechanism for ideological enforcement.
Ultimately, the CCP’s push for “Intelligent Party Building” reveals a fundamental tension. While it seeks to modernize its internal management to become more efficient and responsive, it remains unwilling to give up the coercive, top-down control that defines its Leninist roots. The result is a system where the iron fist is now wearing a digital glove, able to reach further and grip tighter than ever before.
Ningjie Zhu is a researcher at the Center for Advanced Security, Strategic and Integration Studies (CASSIS) at the University of Bonn. You can reach him at nzhu[at]uni-bonn.de.
China has given this movement a name—or at least rebranded the product of the alignment of technology and the courts: Smart courts, zhihui fayuan 智慧法院. The name suggests an alignment on the ground that is both linguistic and textual in the operational spaces of courts. Over the last decade or so, and through its Supreme People’s Court, Chinese officials have led a national effort to modernize the judicial system through the use of emerging technologies. Like other modernization pathways elsewhere, the goals include enhancing access to justice and ensuring that access provides pathways toward just outcomes. Since December 2024, these efforts also include an artificial intelligence platform to help judges improve work efficiency.
But names sometimes are a distraction. And that appeared to be the case with Chinese smart courts. The name became a vessel into which people could pour their larger fears about the transformations they feared most—that the people would no longer be their own masters but would serve technology even as technology appeared to serve them. It is no surprise, then, as Susan Finder relates in her examination of the Supreme People’s Court 2024 Work Report to the National People’s Congress, that the term “smart courts” appears to have been dropped.
Nevertheless, “smart courts” have become not merely a symbol of digital reform but a mirror reflecting deeper ideological and systemic transformations. What appears at first to be a techno-administrative modernization effort quickly reveals itself to be an exercise in high-stakes governance theory. The central question I pursued: Can a digitally advanced judiciary maintain alignment with a ruling party that is not itself digitally transformed? In other words, can a smart court operate effectively without a smart Party?
From Robot Courts to Zombie States?
The study of “smart” or “intelligent,” or “wise” courts can be approached from a large number of perspectives. I start from the ordering premise that these “smart” courts can be understood as an object, and also as a symbol or signified conception, and lastly as the set of objects and behaviors that produces its own meaning through its own dialectical phenomenology—that being by doing. This amalgamation of objects and symbols is a matter central to the continued evolution, in human society, of the notion and practice of judging, and of institutions of judging to which it is both attached and to which it lends meaning. But an object and symbol of what?
The term “smart court” evokes both utopian promise and dystopian anxiety. While the ambition of the People’s Republic of China has been to develop courts that are faster, more accessible, and more consistent, the term has also sparked deeper fears—especially outside China—of robot judges, automated justice, and dehumanized legality. This isn’t merely science fiction. Rather, as I suggested during my talk, these fears can be metaphorically grouped into a three-course cautionary tale.
First, courts risk being consumed by the very technology meant to assist them. Their core identity shifts from a site of judgment to a platform for automated processing. Second, courts may begin to consume their stakeholders—litigants, judges, and lawyers—by reducing them to data points in algorithmic workflows. Third, courts may consume themselves, becoming mechanisms of predictive governance rather than instruments of legal deliberation.
Such risks are not unique to China. But within China’s governance model, they raise particularly intense contradictions—especially the one between technology-led modernization and Marxist-Leninist political control.
Semantics Matter: What Is “Smart”?
Much of the misunderstanding about smart courts, I argue, stems from the loaded semantics of “smartness” itself. In English, “smart” blends quick wit, technological capacity, and sometimes pain (its etymology rooted in “to sting”). In Chinese, however, the distinction is sharper. Zhìnéng (智能) points to technical capability—what we associate with AI and data-driven systems. Zhìhuì (智慧), by contrast, suggests discernment, judgment, and wisdom.
This duality—between instrumental intelligence and human wisdom—is crucial. Smart courts, if they are to serve justice rather than mere efficiency, must retain a core of hui: the human capacity to judge wisely. In the Chinese political imagination, this is ideally embodied by the judge and the collective judiciary. But what happens when the source of wisdom—traditionally human—is threatened by ever-smarter systems?
Tech as Instrument, or as Actor?
China’s digital judiciary remains in a transitional phase—digitisation more than full digitalisation. The emphasis is still on improving efficiency: filing systems, access to records, online hearings. Yet, the horizon is shifting. Predictive analytics, caselaw modeling, and AI-assisted adjudication point to an emerging reality where tech not only facilitates justice but begins to shape its substance.
This introduces a profound conceptual tension. As technology moves from being “smart” (responsive and efficient) to potentially “wise” (autonomous and analytical), it also shifts from being a tool to being an actor. This challenges long-standing assumptions about who—or what—gets to decide within a legal system.
The Smart Court Needs a Smart Party
This transformation becomes most consequential in China, where courts are not isolated institutions but deeply embedded within a Party-led governance model. The CPC is not just a political overseer but the ideological architect of the judiciary’s function. Here, smart courts demand something deeper: a smart Party.
By “smart,” I mean a Party apparatus that itself incorporates digital technologies not only in surveillance and administration, but in its very processes of leadership, assessment, and ideological guidance. Without such a transformation, an asymmetry emerges: the courts grow in techno-capacity, while the Party lags in digital adaptability. That gap threatens to destabilize the very premise of Party-led governance.
Rethinking Interpenetration: Court and Party
Chinese governance is structured around interpenetration—the mutual embeddedness of Party and State institutions. Historically, this interpenetration has been managed through personal-bureaucratic forms: overlapping roles, dual appointments, and ideological campaigns. In the digital age, however, interpenetration is reconfigured through data flows, predictive modeling, and feedback loops.
The smart court, then, is not just a site of dispute resolution but a generator of political data—inputs and outputs that reflect the health of Party ideology and administrative discipline. To oversee such a system, the Party must itself become a digitally competent, analytically capable, and ideologically precise actor.
This is no small task. It means building a digitally-enhanced Party apparatus that can assess court behavior, monitor ideological conformity, and even model the likely impact of judicial decisions—all without becoming a mere appendage of the technologies it deploys.
The smart court exemplifies both the achievements and the contradictions of China’s New Era. On the one hand, it reflects the success of socialist modernization: the integration of productivity-enhancing technologies into governance. On the other hand, it surfaces a contradiction between human-led ideological guidance and machine-augmented decision-making. Two key contradictions define the current moment. First, the contradiction between the leadership of the Party and its capacity to lead in a tech-driven environment. Second, the contradiction between technology as instrument and technology as autonomous force. Both must be addressed if the CPC is to retain its position as the core of the political-economic order.
Ultimately, one must come to understand, or at least consider the plausibility, of a principle that under New Era Chinese Marxist-Leninism, the state apparatus can only be as “smart,” intelligent” and “wise” as it is in the capacity and operations of the Party to do likewise. In the presence of asymmetry two fundamental contradictions must be addressed. The first is the contradiction between the leadership of the Party and its capacity to lead. The second is between the techno-instruments through which Party capacity is undertaken and the ability of the Party apparatus to steer, guide, assess, control and utilize these instruments in the performance of its own duties and responsibilities. The fundamental issue of instrumentalization and capacity remains undisturbed—the more autonomous the technology, the greater the risk that the relationship between instrument and its wielders will be reversed, at least in part. In the absence of a capacity to understand and manage those contradictions, either organs better capacitated to wield techno-instrumentalized applications and processes will drive human collective systems, or human collective systems may become an instrument through which techno-wisdom intelligence may realize its own vision for techno-human perfectibility.
Implications Beyond China
While my analysis focuses on the Chinese context, the underlying challenges are global. Whether in Europe, the U.S., or elsewhere, legal systems face similar dilemmas: How to preserve human judgment in algorithmic environments? How to ensure accountability when decisions are guided by machine learning? How to maintain institutional integrity when data becomes both input and output? China’s smart court project offers a provocative case study. It forces us to confront not only what technology can do for justice, but what it might do to justice—and who, in the end, will be wise enough to decide.
The full contribution is available here. Larry Catá Backer is the W. Richard and Mary Eshelman Faculty Scholar and Professor of Law and International Affairs at Pennsylvania State University. His work focuses on Chinese governance, transnational law, and political theory.
How do ordinary Chinese people think about justice? Tort law may provide an excellent lens through which to explore this question. Within tort law, the issue of children’s tort liability stands out as particularly illuminating, as it highlights the significant challenges families and schools face in raising, caring for, and educating children in China. Four years after the Chinese Civil Code (CCC) came into effect, more than 10,000 court judgments related to children’s tort liability have already been made available online. Thus, it came as no surprise that the Supreme People’s Court’s first judicial interpretation of the Tort Liability Book of the CCC devoted half of its content to children’s tort liability. After all, the CCC has codified six norms in this area, with three addressing children as tortfeasors and three pertaining to children as victims.
However, Chinese legal scholars often criticize the domestic approach to handling children’s tort liability and have made various proposals for improvement based on foreign models. To understand why these proposals have not been adopted by the judiciary, and to uncover the logic behind the development of Chinese tort law, I examined around 400 relevant court decisions. In recent years, big data analysis of Chinese tort law is becoming increasingly popular. However, given my interest in factual patterns and judicial reasoning, I found it more meaningful to review actual court judgments directly, despite the considerable amount of time associated with it. The judgments I examined revealed the following characteristics of the legal regime governing children’s tort liability:
First, the Chinese regime of children’s tort liability is characterized by a liability union in respect of a minor and his or her parents. This means that if children cause harm to others, both they and their parents are held liable. However, the liability of the child wrongdoer and that of their parents is considered one and the same. This stands in stark contrast to other jurisdictions such as the German one, where parental liability is separate from that of their children. For example, unlike under Chinese law, under German law parents are not liable if they have properly educated their children not to play with fire, and the children nevertheless did so and burned down a house. In addition, in the Chinese liability regime, even toddlers can be considered capable of committing tortious acts. For instance, liability was imposed on the parents of a 22-month-old toddler who ran over the victim’s foot with a buggy. In this sense, tort liability applies to children without a minimum age threshold. Parental liability is incurred automatically, regardless of whether the child is under the parents’ care, even when the harm occurs in a boarding school. A child wrongdoer’s family can be released from liability only if it can show that the harm was entirely caused by the victim or a third party. Under the current legal regime, grandparents in China, who often serve as primary caregivers for young children without emuneration, also face considerable liability risks.
Second, the harsh liability regime is mitigated by the fact that Chinese courts rarely assign 100% liability to child wrongdoers and their parents. Child victims are often held partially liable for their own injuries, regardless of their age. In one case, a nine-year-old child was injured by two other children (aged nine and eleven) who had built an improvised swing from strips of artificial grass on a mobile soccer goal at school, causing it to tip over. Although the victim had done nothing more than stand nearby, he was found 20 % at fault. In the eyes of Chinese judges, being at the wrong place at the wrong time already indicate a failure of the child or the parents.
Third, the above-mentioned finding basically holds true also with regards to harms occurring in schools. While many relevant cases involve minors colliding and losing their (milk) teeth, serious incidents also occur in which victims have lost their eyesight or even their lives. To reduce their exposure to liability, many schools, particularly elementary schools, do not allow pupils to leave the classroom during breaks, except to use the toilet. Additionally, an increasing number of school services, such as transportation and lunch, are being outsourced.
One might ask why parents and schools do not simply take out liability insurance to solve the problem. The answer is that ordinary Chinese still tend to try their luck, at least up to now. In most cases, neither the victim nor the tortfeasor has liability insurance. Even worse, medical coverage is particularly precarious for children: 60.44 % of the treatment costs are reportedly born by the families. This is why people sometimes litigate over relatively minor injuries. Confronted with high vulnerability of the child wrongdoer and child victim in coping with accidents, courts in China often have no choice other than distributing losses among all involved parties to avoid social discontent. In this sense, tort law in China is still loyal to the conventional primary purpose of compensating victims.
Lastly, through reading the judgments, a discrepancy between legal scholarship and the judiciary regarding the perception of what constitutes deficiencies in tort law has become apparent. In fact, it is still extremely rare for Chinese scholars to consider court rulings when researching this topic. Instead, emphasis is placed on comparative law. I believe that if the goal of Chinese legal scholarship is to build an autonomous knowledge system and thereby provide guidance to the legislature and judiciary, more attention must be paid to court practice in China and the rationale behind adjudication patterns. So far, due to the social, economic, and political context in which Chinese tort law operates, it has followed a rather need-based and piecemeal path.
“Student companion mothers” in their workshop. Photo by Yiran Zhang
As “the factory of the world,” China’s economy was once driven by a massive cheap-commodity manufacturing sector that relied on a cheap and informal workforce of internal migrants. Since the late 2000s, the People’s Republic of China has embraced a new developmental regime that focused on “upgrading” its manufacturing economy through industrial policies and enhancing the quality of its workforce through labor, welfare, and population law reforms, diverting the Chinese economy away from a cheap-labor regime. The industrial upgrading side, once known as “Made in China 2025,” invested in high-tech and more skill-demanding industries. On the “social upgrading” front, the state introduced more labor regulations, made significant efforts to close the urban-migrant social welfare gap, and promoted the stability of migrant families,aiming to transform its manufacturing workforce into one more formal and urbanized. Nevertheless, I find that the heavy dependence of this upgrading reform on parents’ role in the human capital investment of the next generation’s workforce—lacking sufficient public support—led to a downgrading of today’s manufacturing jobs, especially for women, and a new dynamic of gendered supply-chain subordination.
My finding draws from my 2018-19 fieldwork in the Yangtze River Delta that traced the reconfiguring of labor and migration norms across the hometown and worksite of a group of garment workers. In my field work, I observed a group of middle-aged, female industrial workers who had been laboring in coastal factories alongside their husbands for decades, recently returned to their inland hometowns, precisely at a time when labor and social reforms “upgraded” their old factory jobs into higher-quality employment. This trend of reverse migration was primarily motivated by an emerging community norm that may be translated as “student companion mothers (陪读妈妈)” in the region. As mothers of teenage children, women increasingly felt the community expectation that they should return to their hometown to accompany their children and support them as they entered middle or high school. In China, the household registration system (戶口) creates obstacles for students to go to school outside their permanent domicile. As parents seek work opportunities in coastal areas, they often have to leave their children in the care of their grandparents or other family members. Women increasingly decide to return to their hometowns, consciously prioritizing the demands of their children’s education over job and micro-entrepreneur opportunities at the East coast. “Student companion mothers” often live with their children in group housing next to the school and perform care as meticulously as possible, hoping to generate more study time for their children and thus boost their performance in crucial exams. The norm of intense parenting, which started among urban families in the early 2000s, has reached and adapted to migrant families.
This change in family norms also restructured the regional garment industry. The en masse return of female migrant workers gave rise to a new wave of home-based “mothers’ workshops” around inland schools that subcontracted sewing and other labor-intensive tasks from coastal factories. Owned and staffed by student companion mothers, these workshops form a new segment of precarious work— work that is poorly remunerated, low in productivity and contingent, and yet highly flexible as schedules are tailored to fit care work mothers perform for their children in school. The female workers accept what is less than one-third of their old wages because returning to their hometowns transformed their roles within their household from an equal wage earner to a caregiver. The contingency of this workforce also constrained these inland workshops’ bargaining power in the supply chain, creating feminized enclaves in the manufacturing economy that evade both the labor reform and the state’s industrial upgrading efforts.
My case study of garment workers in China raises three interconnected implications for labor and development law and policies. First, precarious work and women’s unpaid social reproductive labor is structurally integrated. Both the institutional arrangements and normative standards of social reproduction condition female workers’ participation in the paid workforce. Thus, mere legal reforms to paid jobs may not be adequate to raise women’s labor conditions. Second, value-chain-upgrading reforms—the primary policy prescription promoted by the mainstream global value chain literature—have a potential gender impact. As one key element in value-chain upgrading strategies, namely human capital accumulation, inevitably relies on highly gendered social institutions such as the household, it is worth examining how such development strategies distribute the costs and gains of upgrading in and beyond the value chain. Third, it remains of crucial importance to understand population and family policies as an integral part of the People’s Republic of China’s development policies. Such a more comprehensive understanding of development policies not only captures a more holistic picture of the state-society relationship, but also reveals that expectations a policy regime imposes on actors in its economy are competing and sometimes contradictory.
Over the past decade China’s engagement with Latin America has increased dramatically. This is evidenced by China’s emergence as the most important trading partner for many Latin American countries. This dominance is particularly striking when compared with China’s meagre 2% share of regional trade at the turn of the century. Furthermore, the extensive reach of China’s influence is underscored by the participation of 21 out of 33 LAC countries in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s strategic infrastructure development programme. With its multifaceted approach of promoting trade and investment with Latin America, as well as cultural, diplomatic and military advances, China has successfully established itself as an alternative, rival and competitor to the old European and US allegiances in the region.
This roundtable will focus on China’s growing presence in the LAC region, discussing its relevance for EU policymaking concerning the region. We will discuss how China’s expanding presence impacts the EU’s strategic interests, policy priorities, and ongoing regional initiatives. We will also explore the needs of the LAC region and identify the potential for the EU to offer solutions or partnerships in response.
Speakers and moderators:
Parsifal D’Sola Alvarado, Executive Director, Andrés Bello Foundation, China Latin America Research Center
David Chico Zamanillo, Head of Unit – Latin America, Directorate for Regions, Directorate-General for External Policies of the Union (EXPO), European Parliament
Dr. Ceren Engec, Research Fellow, Centre for European Policy Studies
Prof. Dr. Martina Fuchs, Institute of Economic and Social Geography, University of Cologne
Dr. Monika Prusinowska, Ramon y Cajal Fellow, University of Barcelona
Dr. Daniel Sprick, Research Associate for Chinese Legal Culture, University of Cologne
Time & Place: 26 June 2025, 13:30-15:30 CET/CEST International House, University of Cologne (Kringsweg 6)
Join us in person or via Zoom: https://uni-koeln.zoom.us/j/97801513707?pwd=cwKpTWuAazf3b20rLJccJ0AZqWMkC6.1
The roundtable is supported by the University of Cologne, the University of Barcelona, the DIDUE Research Group on International and EU Law, and the Cologne International Forum.
Feel free to contact the organizers Monika Prusinowska monika.prusinowska@ub.edu and Daniel Sprick dsprick@uni-koeln.de.
A public-private partnership (PPP) is a long-term collaboration between a public authority and a private sector entity, in which the private party delivers products or provides services for the government, receiving a fee from the government or end users. The model enables the state authority to provide at less financial costs the necessary infrastructure to citizens and make projects more efficient by relying on the private sector’s expertise. Since 2014, PPP projects have boomed in China. Until 2024, more than 10,000 PPP projects have been launched, with accumulated investment of 16.2 trillion RMB, according to statistics of the Ministry of Finance. With the high number of PPP projects launched in China, many respective contract disputes have been brought to court. Between 2014 and the end of 2023, over 10,186 PPP cases, including civil, criminal and administrative cases, were handled in total. However, there is a heated debate over whether arbitration can be used for PPP contract disputes because PPP contracts are partly classified as administrative and partly as private law contracts, and the disputes may include administrative actions or contractual matters.
Against this backdrop, this article first examines whether the current legal framework of the PRC excludes arbitration as a procedure for resolving PPP contract disputes. In many jurisdictions, such as the UK, the USA, Germany and Italy, the arbitrability of PPP contract disputes is generally accepted. In China, there is still no specific PPP law to comprehensively regulate the initiation and implementation of such projects. This regulatory gap has resulted in a fragmented framework, with various national ministries and the Supreme People’s Court issuing their own regulations or guidelines to govern PPPs and their dispute resolution mechanisms within their respective administrative and/or juridical authority. Prior to May 2015, several regulations issued by the Ministry of Finance and the National Development and Reform Commission allow parties to settle PPP disputes through arbitration. However, following the enactment of the amended Administrative Procedure Law (行政诉讼法) on 1 May 2015, along with its corresponding judicial interpretation issued by the Supreme People’s Court (最高人民法院关于审理行政协议案件若干问题的规定), PPP contracts were explicitly classified as administrative contracts. These provisions established that PPP disputes fall within the exclusive jurisdiction of administrative litigation, thereby excluding arbitration as a permissible dispute resolution mechanism. However, in November 2023, the Ministry of Finance and the National Development and Reform Commission have introduced a new PPP regulation (关于规范实施政府和社会资本合作新机制的指导意见) and concession regulation allowing parties to PPP contracts to select an appropriate dispute resolution method based on the nature of the dispute. Arbitration is permitted if the dispute arises under private law. This setup contradicts the previous guideline of the Supreme People’s Court under which respective disputes fall exclusively under the jurisdiction of administrative courts. The divergence between the rules of the Ministries and those of the Supreme People’s Court creates uncertainty regarding which rules should apply in cases of conflict.
Apart from conducting doctrinal and descriptive analysis, this article develops a comprehensive case study to examine Chinese courts’ attitudes on whether arbitration is used for PPP disputes. Through a key search on the Chinese Case database, a sample of nearly 1,500 relevant cases from January 2014 to December 2023 was collected. A thorough case-by-case review identified 68 qualified cases from different courts, including 4 decisions of Basic-level People’s Courts, 34 decisions of Intermediate People’s Courts, 18 decisions of High People’s Courts, and 12 decisions of the Supreme People’s Court. The data demonstrates that debates surrounding the arbitrability of PPP contract disputes exist across different hierarchies of Chinese courts. Three patterns emerge: Courts of lower hierarchy more often permit the arbitration of PPP contract disputes than courts higher up in the hierarchy. Second, discrepancies in perspectives on the arbitrability of PPP contract disputes arise between first instance and appellate courts. Third, divergent opinions on dispute resolution for PPP contracts also arise among different tribunals within the same court.
The decisions further demonstrate that the courts adopt three distinct approaches when determining the dispute resolution mechanism for PPP contract disputes:
The legal nature of the contract determines the dispute resolution mechanism. If the court classified the contract as a private law contract, civil procedures were permitted. Conversely, if classified as an administrative contract, the administrative courts were granted exclusive jurisdiction.
The nature of the dispute determines the dispute resolution mechanism. Focus is laid on the nature of the dispute itself, specifically, whether they involved the exercise of public authority (administrative disputes) or whether they are rooted in private law issues.
Party autonomy is priority. If there is a valid court selection provision or arbitration clause, the procedure choice is made accordingly.
Building on doctrinal analysis and the examination of relevant cases, this article concludes that arbitration should not be prohibited for resolving PPP disputes. First, PPP contracts should not be uniformly classified as administrative contracts, and current Chinese law does not expressly prohibit the use of arbitration in such cases. Second, the application of the proximate cause doctrine (in China: 近因理论) is recommended to distinguish between disputes arising from administrative actions and those rooted in contractual obligations. The proximate cause doctrine establishes that when a claimant seeks redress for losses resulting from a breach of contract or tortious conduct, they must demonstrate that the ‘consequences’ of the loss were caused directly by the ‘proximate cause’ of the infringer’s breach or tortious act. This approach would enable a more nuanced and appropriate determination of the applicable dispute resolution mechanism. Third, a pro-arbitration stance should be adopted, one that favors the use of arbitration in PPP disputes while narrowly defining what constitutes an administrative dispute within the context of such contracts. This approach not only leverages the inherent advantages of arbitration, such as neutrality, flexibility, and enforceability, to effectively balance the protection of public and private interests, but also alleviates the concerns of private investors. Winning rates for private parties in administrative litigation are very low. By reinforcing confidence in fair and efficient dispute resolution, this position may encourage broader private sector participation in PPP projects and contribute to the sustainable development of the PPP model.
The full paper, titled “Arbitrability of PPP Contract Disputes in China: Based on An Analysis of 68 Chinese Cases”, is published in the Commercial Arbitration and Mediation (商事仲裁与调解), vol. 1/2025 (in Chinese). Xianqi Peng is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Law & Criminology at Ghent University, Belgium. His research focuses on international investment law, private international law, arbitration, African law and public private partnerships. He published in journals such as African Studies and Nankai Law Review. He can be contacted at xianqi.peng[at]ugent.be.
The headquarters of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection / National Supervision Commission at 41 Pinganli West Street (平安里西大街41号) in Beijing
When Xi Jinping came to power in 2013, he spoke of institutional cages to constrain public power. While many saw this as signaling a move toward legal constraints, the reality has evolved quite differently. Instead of strengthening external checks, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has developed an elaborate disciplinary apparatus that simultaneously constrains and shapes its members’ behavior.
My research examines a fundamental puzzle: why does the CCP persist with its opaque, Party-centered disciplinary approach despite widespread criticism? Drawing on Party regulations, news reports, propaganda TV programs, internal cadre training materials, Chinese and English scholarship, and interviews with Party disciplinary officials, I argue that the answer lies in understanding the dual nature of Party discipline (党纪). While commonly viewed as a regulatory system of rules and punishments, Party discipline also functions as what I call a “disciplinary infrastructure”, a Foucauldian framework, in that it simultaneously shapes Party members’ behavior and deters misconduct. This duality reveals that the CCP uses discipline not just as a control mechanism, but as an elaborate apparatus for producing political compliance.
The metaphor of infrastructure is purposeful. Much like urban infrastructure shapes city life while remaining largely invisible, the Party’s disciplinary mechanisms operate through everyday practices and routines that fundamentally mold behavior. This infrastructure becomes apparent mainly when it malfunctions, as its influence permeates all aspects of Party life. Consider how water systems shape urban development – similarly, the Party’s disciplinary infrastructure determines the flow of power, the patterns of behavior, and the development of political culture within the organization.
The system’s effectiveness stems from four distinctive characteristics. First, it functions productively, actively shaping behavior rather than merely constraining it. This is exemplified by the Party’s “comprehensive and strict governance” (全面从严治党) approach, which integrates political education with detailed conduct regulations. Cadre training programs, for instance, don’t just teach rules; they create experiences that reshape how officials understand their role and responsibilities.
This leads to the infrastructure’s second key characteristic: it addresses not only external behavior but also seeks to transform the “soul”. The Party’s rhetoric of “curing the illness to save the patient” reflects this deeper aim. The goal is inner transformation, not just external compliance. Study sessions, self-criticism meetings, and political education serve to reshape members’ fundamental orientations rather than just their outward compliance. This therapeutic approach transcends simple deterrence, aiming instead to manufacture compliance through deep psychological transformation.
The system also generates comprehensive knowledge about its subjects, creating a power/knowledge nexus that reinforces Party control. Beyond tracking professional performance, the Party maintains detailed records of personal connections, political attitudes, and daily behavior. This accumulated knowledge enables precise calibration of control mechanisms, allowing the Party to shape conduct through carefully targeted interventions. The depth and breadth of this information collection creates full legibility of the members- a condition where every aspect of member behavior becomes potential data for evaluation and control.
Finally, drawing on the concept of the panopticon, the system creates an environment of constant potential oversight that converts external monitoring into internalized self-discipline. Party members are acutely aware that supervision can occur at any moment—whether through inspection teams, peer monitoring, or documentation reviews. This unpredictability, combined with calculated isolation, promotes self-regulation as members internalize disciplinary standards. The system’s brilliance lies in how it creates an automatic, self-sustaining disciplinary mechanism where members effectively police themselves, significantly reducing the need for costly direct oversight.
This framework helps explain several paradoxes in the CCP’s approach to discipline. Consider the Party’s handling of official misconduct through internal disciplinary system. While seemingly lenient compared to criminal prosecution, this “therapeutic” approach actually optimizes power by preserving valuable human capital while reinforcing the Party’s authority to discipline and reform. The official is isolated, made to study Party documents, write self-criticisms, and undergo “thought reform” – a process aimed at producing not just compliance but loyalty.
The disciplinary infrastructure’s interaction with China’s legal system reveals its calibrated design. At one level, it creates fine-grained behavioral controls that operate beneath legal thresholds – regulating matters too subtle for formal law to address. It also maintains parallel oversight mechanisms outside legal frameworks, allowing the Party to address conduct that might be politically problematic but not legally wrong. Most intriguingly, it sometimes supersedes legal protections in service of Party control, as seen in special investigative procedures and detention powers. The recent establishment of the National Supervision Commission institutionalizes these dynamics in new ways.
Understanding this infrastructure helps explain several puzzling aspects of Chinese governance. Why do legal reforms often falter against Party discipline? How does the Party maintain control over its massive membership? The answer lies in how this disciplinary infrastructure shapes behavior through multiple, reinforcing mechanisms that formal law cannot replicate. By revealing the dual nature of the CCP’s power as both coercive and productive, this framework offers a new paradigm for understanding how modern authoritarian organizations maintain control.
Consider how this plays out in practice. When local officials implement policies, they’re motivated not just by legal requirements but by an internalized understanding of Party expectations, shaped through years of disciplinary training and oversight. Their behavior is guided by both formal rules and informal norms, enforced through a complex web of organizational practices that constitute the disciplinary infrastructure.
This analysis offers crucial insights for understanding the CCP’s resilience and the sophistication of its political control mechanisms. Rather than relying solely on coercion, the Party has developed an intricate disciplinary infrastructure that fundamentally reshapes member behavior through comprehensive oversight and systematic interventions. This helps explain why the CCP has maintained such effective control over its massive bureaucracy and why Western observers often underestimate its organizational capabilities.
For scholars of Chinese politics and law, this framework illuminates why conventional legal reform models based on Western experiences often fail to capture the reality of China’s party-state system. The Party’s disciplinary infrastructure operates beyond the bounds of formal legal institutions, creating a comprehensive environment for behavior modification that works simultaneously through political, organizational, and institutional channels. This explains both the durability of Party control and the limitations of viewing China’s governance solely through the lens of formal legal institutions.
These insights are particularly relevant as China continues to refine its governance model under Xi Jinping. The multifaceted nature of the Party’s disciplinary system demonstrates how modern authoritarian regimes can maintain control through complex institutional mechanisms that go far beyond the simple repression emphasized in traditional authoritarian regime theory. This analysis thus contributes not only to our understanding of the CCP’s intra-Party disciplinary regime but also to broader theoretical debates about authoritarian resilience and state capacity in contemporary authoritarian regimes.
Shuyu Chu, former China Law and Policy Fellow at Georgetown University (2021–2023), completed her PhD at the University of Hong Kong’s Faculty of Law. Her doctoral thesis, “Beyond Anti-Corruption: The Chinese Communist Party’s Disciplinary Infrastructure,” was ranked in the top 5% and awarded the HKU Dissertation Year Fellowship (2024) and nominated for the prestigious Li Ka Shing Prizes for Best PhD thesis. Drawing on unique access to internal Party materials, extensive empirical research, and an innovative application of Foucauldian theory, this groundbreaking study offers unprecedented insights into China’s disciplinary systems. It is now being developed into a book manuscript. She welcomes discussions with publishers interested in bringing this timely analysis to market. She can be reached at chushuyu@connect.hku.hk.
How did you find your way into the world of homeowners in China?
Around 2017, I noted that many of my friends in China, former classmates from Beijing who now work for companies or the government, began complaining about their property management companies. Some deliberated establishing homeowner associations. This group of professionals is generally busy with work and their families, have little spare time and are not interested in discussing politics. But here they came forward, spending a lot of time working on creating homeowner associations (业主委员会，HoAs), to that end actively engaging in bargaining and negotiations that sometimes had them threatened by government officials and property management companies. I wondered, what is their motivation? There is no money to be made from this, and the social capital to be gained is rather small or guaranteed. I realized that the phenomenon is very broad in China.
Why should we care about homeowner associations (HoAs) in China?
Anywhere, HoAs are fascinating – some property law scholars go as far as to argue that HoAs are probably the most important kind of quasi-private organizations, in the USA just as in China. They are like a government in the neighborhoods, an important institution in everyone’s daily life.
In the Chinese case, the emergence of property rights and with it the HoAs are probably one of the most important results of China’s market-oriented reforms. If you compare urban Chinese life in 1978, 1979 to today, the most important and visible consequence is that people now own their homes. For most middle-class families, their apartment is their most important investment. As a popular saying went back then, the three most important things to Chinese families are “儿子、票子、房子 (a child/son, cash, a house).
In addition to the right to own property, the right to associate is a notable development because it is a right of which there are not many, even in today’s China. The other case that comes to mind are the villager’s committees, which were much in the focus of scholars who saw them as potential roots for democracy. While that hope barely materialized, the urban version of them – the homeowner associations – played out very differently. They were not based on lineages, bound into the old cultural traditions of hierarchies and authorities like villager committees in rural China. HoAs are formed by urban citizens who bought apartments from all over China without prior connections. The moment they move into a condomium, they are strangers to one another, but need to learn how to solve their common problems together. In urban residential compounds, one’s social status, like who your father is and where you work doesn’t matter as much. Neighbors had to learn how to communicate with others on an equal ground.
How are HoAs different from other non-government organizations?
“Non-governmental organization” is a broad term, they are not necessarily democratic. Many operate more like corporation: A leader, employees, structures. HoAs make decisions together by voting, and members are volunteers. HoAs also have their own independent source of funding, unlike most NGOs who rely on external funding.
Can you give us some historical context: How did the HoA wave set off and how has the relationship between HoAs and local governments evolved over time?
The background is the urban land reform starting in the 1980s, and the nationwide housing reform in 1984. The first HoA was established in 1991 in Shenzhen. The reason was that some of the residential compounds were still paying the industrial electricity price, which is higher than that for residential electricity. The homeowners realized that they cannot negotiate with the electricity company one by one, and as the entire building was affected, sought to team up with their neighbors. Some of the first homeowner activists I talked to, now in their 70s, explained that there were a lot of different problems in the neighborhood such as with sloppy property management companies, but the companies refused to talk to individual residents. The condominium living structure that emerged in cities in China really forced homeowners to bond.
In 2003 the State Council promulgated the Real Estate Management Regulations, the first national-level law that officially recognized HoAs and gave them a legal basis. One issue debated leading up to this was a mass of complaints of consumers about apartments they bought being defect. Hence, it was the Ministry of Construction 建设部 (now: Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development) which came up with the plan of granting HoAs power to better discipline the real estate developers, to solve the problem of low quality house construction. Housing issues were thus characterized in Chinese media as part of the “consumer rights” movement that was taking off to counter the wave of low quality products and fraud in the marketplace. Back then, the Ministry of Civic Affairs protested during the consultation process of the Regulations, arguing that HoAs might clash with the Residence Committees (居委会), which are grassroots governance organizations inscribed in the Constitution. The response by the Ministry of Construction was to say that they are private organizations seeking to support the sound development of the real estate industry and open to aid the Residence Committees where they could. This somehow settled the tension.
Frankly speaking, there are a lot of overlaps between HoAs and Residence Comittees. HoAs hire their own security guards, cleaning services and so on. There is indeed a direct competition of power between the HoAs and the Party-state (in the form of the Residential Committees) right in the neighborhood.
The key conflict that your research explores is the Party-state’s constant quest for maintaining social stability and homeowner’s interests in self-governing their private surroundings. What are typical cases in which these two positions clash?
There is an incentive for the government to support HoAs, they hope that HoAs can resolve local issues quickly and smoothly. Local governments rely on the HoAs to take care of many things. The street-level government branches (街道办) hope to maintain the status quo, or are even supportive of the HoAs. They call upon on the HoAs for instance when enforcing restrictions during the Covid-19 lockdowns. On the other hand, the HoAs can grow “out of control”. I conceptualize this tension as the authoritarian dilemma.
One issue of contestation is when HoAs want to switch property management companies. In one case for instance, protests by homeowners including threats and even physical violence unfolded in a typical middle-class neighborhood in Beijing because of that. The municipal government intervened and cast the homeowners as trouble-makers. Homeowners then created platforms to connect with peers across the city in solidarity. Eventually, a deputy mayor of Beijing backed down and apologized. Such stories happened in quite a lot of neighborhoods where the local government had decided to side with the property management companies rather than grant HoAs requests.
Another type of conflict is the requirement to establish party cells in HoAs. A central Party document encouraged to do so and in some places, especially smaller cities, local branches have translated that into binding rules. For instance, Huizhou required that 60% of a HoA’s board members to be Party members. Most HoA members aren’t Party members, so the requirement isn’t feasible to begin with. A Huizhou homeowner, not a Party member but much supported by his neighbors, contested Party member quotas. He initiated a legality review of relevant local policies at the provincial People’s Congress. He received a favorable reply and managed to force the local government to officially abolish the Party member quotas. His argument was straightforward: He said that neither the Property Law nor the Civil Code mentioned a requirement of minimum Party member quotas, and thus the respective local policies are not lawful.
So the Party’s measures to impact HoAs from the inside largely failed. Are such plans now shelved permanently?
I don’t think the Party center paid much attention before, but in 2017 the CPCCC and the State Council jointly issued a first Opinion specifically addressing neighborhood governance. Now they realized that getting a hold on the HoAs is part of what the Party calls controlling “the last inch of governance”. But can they succeed? Not 100%, unless there is a war-like emergency situation where the market can be totally disregarded temporarily. But even then, I doubt that the Party-state has the resources to exercise direct control over so many neighborhoods in the country for a long time.
Covid-19 was an illustrative example case: Based on my fieldwork, the lockdowns were not realized by placing police everywhere, but by relying on the homeowners to govern themselves. In a case I observed, the HoA successfully refused to place paid security at the gates that would enforce the lockdowns. One of my interlocutors in charge of a HoA said: “A smart leader doesn’t have to do things by himself. A smart leader has people take care of their own business.” Given the limited resources the government has, I don’t think they could directly exert much control. Otherwise the residence committees would have been much better equipped and resourceful. The ongoing fiscal crisis of local governments exacerbates this situation.
A homeowner association’s protest shirt reading “return my property owner rights, return my home”
Let’s talk about fieldwork in China. You really created a 360 degrees account of the HoA-Party state relationship by talking to and gathering documents from a wide range of parties involved. What challenges did you face in data collection?
I think it helps that I like listening – to people’s stories and problems. Property management is a topic that many homeowners don’t deem sensiitive and that they have something to say and complain about. Getting to know leaders of their networks really helped. It takes Patience and time to build interpersonal connections and trust ,but it doesn’t always work. I ended up joining one potential interviewee on a very long morning run to build trust, but ended up not getting the interview even after 10 kilometres running together. His neighborhood had been in the news, that is probably a reason he was cautious.
A challenge was my affiliation with a university in Hong Kong during the years of social unrest in Hong Kong, people sometimes saw it as sensitive. Later, the affiliation with an American university did not exactly help. Generally speaking, in recent years, people have become much more cautious in terms of who they talk to. That even goes for a formerly not sensitive topic such as property management in residential compounds.
Overall, what role do courts play in neighborhood democratization? At least for the part of administrative litigation, I discovered that a notably large proportion of cases are related to facility management companies in urban residential compounds.
This research really changed my understanding of courts in China. Previously, from my work on small property, I concluded that courts just seek to maintain the status quo. They weren’t exactly at the frontier of social change.
I now found that legal rights and courts actually matter a lot. Courts across China have a huge impact in shaping the fate of HoAs: there are many thousands of case decisions, from both civil and administrative litigation. In one chapter, Rule of Law and Democracy, I explain the big differences regarding the rates of HoAs in Beijing (12%), Shanghai (94%) and Shenzhen (41%). One major reason are courts.
Courts in Shanghai for instance are much more supportive of homeowner autonomy. The Civil Code passed in 2020 imposes stringent requirements on HoAs, for instance that their resolutions are only effective if at least 2/3 of the members participated in a vote. Achieving that is a difficult task: Even just collecting signature from homeowners, often a few hundreds or thousands, is not easy. However, before the Civil Code established this requirement, Shanghai already had a local practice of allowing homeowners to pass resolutions according to the rules they stipulate in their charters. Hence, when the Civil Code came out, in order to not radically break with the established practice, Shanghai courts interpreted the Civil Code provisions very broadly, deciding in favor of homeowners. So Shanghai courts developed a legal reasoning stressing original intent and fundamental spirit of the Civil Code as supportive of private autonomy. The issue has also been brought before the Supreme People’s Court, the local people’s congress and administration, but it was the Shanghai courts that provided a pragmatic solution, demonstrating the unique advantages to local judicial craftsmanship in handling the conflicts between national law and local practices.
Last but not least: What are research questions, suggestions, ideas that you take away from this project?
The first one is a more comprehensive study of the right to associate. So far, it has barely been taken seriously. There are many studies about collective actions, like protests, but I think there is a difference between these and the legal right to associate. HoAs are active in all sorts of things, such as help bargain compensation after the Tianjin explosion in 2015, as our colleague Benjamin van Rooij pointed out.
Secondly, I want to do a comparative study of HoAs across different cultures. How do homeowners resolve problems together? That can tell us a lot about how societies are organized. If anyone is interested participating in this, do reach out to me.
Shitong Qiao’s book The Authoritarian Commons: Neighborhood Democratization in Urban China was published with Cambridge University Press in January 2025. Shitong Qiao is a Professor of Law and the Ken Young-Gak Yun and Jinah Park Yun Research Scholar at Duke Law School. He also holds the title of Honorary Professor at the University of Hong Kong and is a core faculty member of the Asia/Pacific Studies Institute at Duke University. He was previously a tenured professor at the University of Hong Kong, a Law and Public Afffairs (LAPA) fellow at Princeton University, and the inaugural Jerome A. Cohen Visiting Professor of Law at NYU.
