Bad Cop, Good Lawyer? Using Legal Advice Websites to Challenge Police in China

• In Event: Managing Power and Crises in Xi Jinping's China (Pre-Recorded)

Abstract

How do people interact with the police and other coercive agents in authoritarian regimes? In China, the contentious politics literature has long focused on political dissidents and their experiences with the central and local state, but little is known about how everyday people interact with coercive actors. Scholars are just beginning to make advances in understanding public perceptions of the police in China (Sun, Hu, Wu 2013), yet these reports are constrained by the lens of survey research and thus provide a necessarily filtered view of police society relations. Some information is available online in the form of news reports and blog posts, but this content is often heavily censored. Complementary sources and methodologies are needed to fill in the gaps left by survey research and traditional news analysis. By leveraging data from legal advice websites, this study provides new insight into regular interactions between the police and society.

For over a decade, average Chinese have taken advantage of legal advice websites to help them with a variety of legal issues. These sites allow them to anonymously ask questions of, receive answers from, and connect to registered lawyers. Their questions offer valuable insight into the ways in which average Chinese deal with and think about their problems, especially issues that put them at odds with the state and therefore tend to be more sensitive. Additionally, their ostensibly narrow legal focus allows legal advice websites to avoid much of the censorship that plagues China’s media and internet. This article is part of the first research effort to study China’s legal advice websites and takes advantage of a unique dataset of 9.5 million observations scraped from one of China’s most popular sites over a five-year period, of which over 150,000 relate to China’s police and law enforcement.

Using this dataset we analyze accounts of individual experiences with police violence, corruption, ineffectiveness, and, conversely, helpfulness or assistance. The posts also provide details about public mistrust and fear. The unique reach of the posts allows us to probe regional and locational differences in experiences with the police and compare those experiences across time, as police reforms were enacted and major police scandals made public. The results offer an unprecedented view into ground-level experiences on the issues that matter most for the inhabitants of any state: do people trust or fear the police when they encounter a legal issue, how commonplace is police violence and misconduct, and how do larger events such as reform and scandal impact the everyday experience of members of the public who come into contact with the police? Ultimately, could publicization of police abuses undermine faith in the state and limit the regime’s coercive power when it needs it most?

Authors

• Suzanne E. Scoggins, Clark University

• John Wagner Givens, Kennesaw State University