Rule of Law with Chinese Characteristics

Abstract

global view that still manages to do justice to important context-specific nuances. The chapters relating to arbitration in particular are significant, as the literature on arbitration in China is comparatively sparse and Gu is already a recognized expert on the subject. Third, this book brings to light a variety of empirical metrics about caseloads and providers (some of which are difficult to access by non-Chinese-speaking audiences), thereby providing valuable insights about what is happening on the ground. Finally, this book contextualizes China’s civil justice reforms in the past decade, both within broader legal, sociopolitical, and market developments, as well as within existing debates in the scholarly literature relating to dispute resolution and law and development. It skilfully draws out implications of the author’s research for a number of conversations of interest to law and society scholars, comparativists, China experts, proceduralists, and scholars of arbitration and ADR. The book raises many more interesting questions that the limits of space prevent me from considering in a meaningful way. For example, to what extent are private, informal processes such as mediation appropriate for disputes involving large numbers of plaintiffs or sensitive issues of a public nature, as they have been in China through the use of Partyled “grand mediation” in complex product liability and land seizure matters? Ever since Owen Fiss’s Against Settlement, a dominant strand of scholarship holds that civil disputes with a “public policy dimension” belong in public courts rather than in ADR1—even though scholars have recently begun documenting the ways that informal dispute resolution are increasingly being preferred for certain divisive social conflicts.2 US disputeresolution scholars in particular will find Gu’s comparative study a refreshing perspective on these issues.