Grand Mediation and Legitimacy Enhancement in Contemporary China—the Guang'an model

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“…However, in the event of patient dissatisfaction, limited options for recourse are available and the existing channels are seen as biased (Hu and Zeng 2015;Pan et al 2015;Zhang and Cai 2018). These structural problems have led some to adopt and justify yi nao as a way of protecting their rights when they believe they have been mistreated (there have also been cases driven entirely by economic interests).…”

Troublemaking in hospitals: performed violence against the healthcare professions in China

“…Treatment is seen as rushed, impersonal and disrespectful, contributing to patients' discontent (Wang, D., 2015). However, in the event of patient dissatisfaction, limited options for recourse are available and the existing channels are seen as biased (Hu & Zeng, 2015;Zhang & Cai, 2018). Instead of helping patients to resolve medical concerns and disputes, legal and bureaucratic mechanisms have, thus, played a role in fuelling Yi Nao incidents (Xiao, 2016;Pan et al, 2015).…”

“…If one of the targets is not accomplished, all other achievements of the local leadership will be void, and the responsible people will not receive promotion (Heberer & Trappel, 2013, p. 1051. Related scholarship on contentious politics in China (e.g., Lee & Zhang, 2013;Hu & Zeng, 2015;Yu & Huang, 2016;Xie & Liu, 2019) have described the ways in which systems of "stability-maintenance" influence the thinking and behaviour of grassroots-level officials in everyday contexts. Essentially, the discourse of "stability" functions as a "cognitive filter" or "framing device" that structures the responses and actions of officials to perceived threats to stability (Sandby- Thomas, 2010, p. 155).…”

“…Such alliances were evident in seven cases (see also Tu, 2016). This downward transfer of responsibility for "stability-maintenance" is motivated by the imperative to alleviate the burden on the government of addressing medical disputes (Lee & Zhang, 2013;Zhang & Cai, 2018;Hu & Zeng, 2015) and by the government's wish to extricate itself from social conflicts within local communities.…”

"Jurisprudential Massage": Legal Fictions, Sectarian Citizenship, and the Epistemics of Dissent in Post-socialist China

“…And yet, this revamped interest in dispute mediation can still be faulted for trading in the same old homeostatic currency of functionalism, that is, the flattening of the discourse of law on to the exigencies of power (Pirie 2013, 31, 187). In a context such as the People's Republic, this usually entails using mediation to test the correlation between the deregulation of justice and regime stability (e.g., Erie 2015, 1003; Hu and Zeng 2015, 47; Gallagher 2017, 30). While this line of inquiry has much to recommended it, its latent legal pragmatism—the conflation of the assumed social ends of law (stability) and its institutional means (mediation)—creates a source of unwanted inconsistency.…”