Justice from Above or Below? Popular Strategies for Resolving Grievances in Rural China

Abstract

Research on rural conflict in China suggests that village leaders are sources of trouble and obstacles to justice and that aggrieved villagers have more trust in and receive more satisfactory redress from higher-level solutions than from local solutions.

Access to Civil Justice and Race, Class, and Gender Inequality

“…Collected histories of many disputes reveal a pyramid-shaped distribution of action, with only some experiences escalating from one level to the next, progressively narrowing as it reaches the top, typically defined as court proceedings (Miller & Sarat 1980Murayama 2007, pp. 29-30;Nielson & Nelson 2005b; but see Michelson 2007aMichelson , 2008. The pyramid shape graphically depicts an empirical generalization that holds in most studied complex societies: Relatively few grievances are taken to lawyers, courts, or officials, and most never make it to trial.…”

“…The incidence of justiciable problems is widespread across the socioeconomic orders of studied societies (e.g., for Australia, Fishwick 1992; for Canada, Bogart & Vidmar 1990;Currie 2007Currie , 2009for China, Michelson 2007a, 2008for England andWales, Genn et al 1999, Pleasence 2006;for Japan, Murayama 2007;for Scotland, Genn & Paterson 2001; for the United States, Consortium on Legal Services and the Public 1994a,b, Curran 1977, Miller & Sarat 1980, Silberman 1985, but some groups are more likely to report such problems than others. In capitalist contexts, problem occurrences increase with household income and/or education, in part because people of higher socioeconomic status engage in more consumer and investment activity (Bogart & Vidmar 1990; Consortium on Legal Services and the Public 1994a,b; Mulherin & Coumarelos 2007; Pleasence et al 2004, p. 324;Silberman 1985; but see Pleasence 2006, p. 21).…”

Redressing Grievances and Complaints Regarding Basic Service Delivery

“…In those circumstances confinement to "retail"-level review of individual complaints that identify the failure of line agencies to deliver on the government's own expressed policies may constitute an important, and politically feasible, first step. This appears to be the strategy being taken in by households in rural China, who are increasingly appealing to 116 WORLD DEVELOPMENT village leaders to resolve disputes involving the government (Michelson, 2008). One of the crucial roles that NGOs can play, with respect to demand for redress procedures, is the direct provision of legal and quasi-legal support to marginalized individuals and groups.…”

Review Essay—Access to Justice in Post-Mao China: Assessing the Politics of Criminal and Administrative Law

“…Mechanisms of client selection, which allow lawyers to use legal knowledge and linguistic gymnastics to refuse the representation of certain undesirable clients, undermine ordinary citizens' access to justice (Michelson 2003(Michelson , 2007. Lawyers' economic concerns are rooted in the difficulty of collecting attorneys' fees, either through contingency arrangements that can be hard to enforce or through hourly or fixed-fee agreements that clients frequently fail to uphold.…”