By Larry Catá Backer

The idea of “smart courts” has become a globally shared ambition. From the European Commission’s “Digitalisation of Justice” toolbox to the U.S. judiciary’s call for more efficient digital infrastructures, and with examples emerging from Egypt to Tanzania, the movement to enhance the judicial function with technology is a planetary phenomenon. Yet, as I explored during the workshop Smart Courts in Comparative Perspective at the University of Cologne this July, no national project invites as much theoretical scrutiny—and perhaps as much political resonance—as China’s.

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.