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Authoritarian regimes sometimes professionalize their legal systems to govern more effectively. Yet when quasi-autonomous courts rule in contradiction to popular conceptions of right and wrong—popular morality—it might threaten citizens’ trust in the regime. We use the case of contemporary China to investigate this “moral-legal dilemma”—the competing needs of legal development and the satisfaction of popular justice concerns. Four case studies demonstrate that when court rulings conflict with popular morality, the party-state selectively alters decisions, so long as intervention does not significantly jeopardize the integrity of the legal system. Two online survey experiments then assess citizens’ reactions to moral-legal conflict in court rulings. We find that people are more likely to experience “moral dissonance” when legal decisions conflict with popular morality. We do not find that moral-legal conflict in court rulings significantly undermines individuals’ trust in the regime. Our analysis underscores the need for more attention to the moral foundations of authoritarian rule.

AHSTDGGZL 《安徽省土地改革资料》 * BSDA Baoshan District Archives CCDC Fengyang County Archives, Contemporary China Documents Center CCPM Database on the History of Contemporary Chinese Political Movements, CUHK JSPA Jiangsu Provincial Archives JSNMYD 《江苏农民运动档案史料选编》 * JSTGYD 《江苏省土地改革运动》 QJCA Quanjiao County Archives SBTGWX 《苏北土地改革文献》 * SHMA Shanghai Municipal Archives SNTGWX 《苏南土地改革文献》 * XCSSN 《乡村三十年: 凤阳农村社会经济发展实录 (1949-1983)》 * ZGTDGGSLXB 《中国土地改革史料选编》 * *Internal publication (内部资料／内部印行) The long-term objectives of the land reform campaign were decidedly Gramscian: to destroy the hegemonic order and create a new revolutionary subjectivity among the peasantry that would establish the Party-state's authority and facilitate further mobilization. Accordingly, I find that participation in collective violence increased solidarity between communities and the nascent Maoist state, at the expense of those targeted for violence. For the Party, this was one of the main goals of violent mass mobilization: it sought to increase its popular legitimacy by styling itself as the bringer of justice and to use this newfound legitimacy to recruit new Party members, spur agricultural production, and, even more importantly in the short term, entice locals to join the People's Volunteer Army (中国人民志愿军) to fight in the ongoing Korean War. the centrality of Mobilization and its alternatiVe explanationsThis study shifts our attention to mobilization processes and their implications for understanding the uneven development of state authority at the righteous reVolutionaries these material incentives may be particularly alluring in instances of economic depression or instability, which lower the opportunity cost for participation. 37 Because land reform was nominally an economic campaign, one would think that the Party mobilized violence through the provision of selective economic incentives; however, there is little documented evidence of locals receiving more land or other assets because of their participation in violence during this period. Over 60 percent of the rural population received some land during the land reform campaign, 38 and this land was redistributed to villagers regardless of their actual participation in violent class struggle. As Zhou Xiaohong explains, the 1950 Agrarian Reform Law called for less radical economic redistribution because leaders were concerned with economic reconstruction after the war, so they called for protecting the "rich peasant economy" (富农经济) and narrowing the scope of land confiscation to landlords, which left landholders in the middle of the land distribution alone.This policy of "flattening the ends while not touching the center [of the economic distribution]" (中间不动两头平) meant that middle and rich peasants often ended up having more land than the poor peasants and farmworkers, who were the main economic beneficiaries of the campaign. 39 Statistical data on per capita landholdings across the East China region illustrate this point. Figure 2 shows that before land reform there was significant landholdin...

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