Rolling Back Transparency in China's Courts

• In Event: Courts and Politics in China

Abstract

Over the past decade, in an effort to increase the accountability of the court system to the public, the court system in China has engaged in a radical transparency effort, with courts from around China making public case descriptions of tens of millions of cases. However, in the last several years, researchers and journalists have noticed that some cases have been quietly removed from the website that hosts this data. In this paper, we systematically examine the rollback of transparency in China. Using a database of 42 million cases we collected on publicly available court cases before the removal, we describe the types of cases that have been removed. We then test the hypothesis that case removal is related to international scrutiny by relating the removal to recent use of the data in newspaper articles in the international press. We do find a relationship between international scrutiny and case removal, suggesting that international pressure can ironically reduce transparency efforts. However, we also find that other idiosyncratic factors, including website design and intra-party relations, are also important. Our findings shed light on the determinants of transparency and its retrenchment.

Authors

• Margaret E Roberts, University of California, San Diego

• Benjamin Liebman, Columbia Law School

• Rachel E. Stern, University of California, Berkeley

• Xiaohan Wu, UC San Diego