This article analyzes traffic dispute resolution in contemporary urban China as embodying what I term processual recognition. I describe how various complex status‐inflected qualities, legal‐bureaucratic institutions and actors, and processes and perceptions of recognition interact in producing resolutions and a sense of (in)justice or (un)fairness. My attention to “recognition” is distinctive in foregrounding disputants’ investments in identity and dignity as enacted through embodied and affective practices. Contrary to accounts of contemporary China that emphasize moral breakdown, I argue that traffic disputes between strangers produce a spatially and temporally contingent moral economy that connects the production of justice with individual desire for recognition, socio‐structural configurations, and legal‐bureaucratic imperatives. I further argue that existing accounts focused on substantive and procedural justice fail to accommodate variant cultural and institutional configurations of dispute resolution, and that scholars should also attend to questions of recognition.

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