Law professor Carl Minzner writes on his blog about Chinese authorities’ turn away from legal reform, which many had pinned their hopes on as a way to create a stable institution through which citizens could register grievances:
To be sure, law has not been abandoned in China. Authorities continue to promulgate statutes. Citizens continue to invoke legal norms to protect their interests. There is still some room for progressive legal reform. Nor are Chinese developments without precedent. Litigation has fallen out of favor in American courts as well. Nations such as India and the Philippines are resuscitating traditional mediation as part of a global reconsideration of legal norms and institutions transplanted from the West. Indeed, the revived Chinese emphasis on mediation may produce some useful local experiments with alternatives to court trials that may help respond to the pressing problems facing rural Chinese parties and judges.
But the new track is problematic. Despite being cloaked in the language of mediation, the primary focus of these shifts is not on assisting parties to voluntarily resolve their own grievances (although that may be a beneficial result in some cases). Rather, the aim is suppress conflicts and block citizen petitions from rising toward central officials – at all costs.
As a result, Chinese authorities have toughened career and financial incentives facing judges. Those with high rates of out-of-court settlements are rewarded. Those who issue decisions resulting in aggrieved parties petitioning higher officials are sanctioned. Party officials are advancing new propaganda models for Chinese judges to emulate. Judge Chen Yanping, selected as a national “model judge” in 2010, has been hailed by state media for resolving over 3100 cases in 14 years, without a single petition by a dissatisfied party, nor a single reversed case. Her secret? Avoidance of law, adherence to Party doctrine, and an unflagging determination to press for a mediated settlement in absolutely every case that comes before her.
This is not mediation. Rather, it is political pressure disguised in mediation garb. And it is has severe effects. Some Chinese judges complain of having to resort to arm-twisting of parties to reach their mandatory target ratios for mediation. Others report throwing legal norms out the window entirely, or even using their own court budgets to pay off disgruntled parties who threaten to stage protests.
