Rule by Law or Rule by Campaign: Do Laws on the Books Matter in China?

• In Event: Technologies of Governance in China: Law, Campaigns, and Social Credit

Abstract

China, especially its legal system, has come a long way since the Mao-era, when policy was often enacted by campaign and propaganda. The Chinese Communist Party has consistently emphasized the rule of law and the development of a robust legal system and profession appear to demonstrate substance behind their assertions. Yet, policy can still be campaign-driven and both the Chinese public and the local state sometimes react more to scandals, viral social media, and leadership pronouncements rather than changes to the formal legal system. This paper asks how much law on the books actually matters in China with a special emphasis on whether average people respond to changes in the formal legal system or are more likely to take cues from campaigns, pronouncements, and other news.

To answer our question, we turn to a unique source of data, legal advice websites in China. These sites provide a forum for China’s lawyers to answer legal questions anonymously posted by average people. Part of the first major research effort to study China’s legal advice websites, this paper relies on a unique dataset of over 10 million observations scraped from one of China’s most popular sites. We examine four areas which have seen a significant shift in their formal legal structure over the past decade: 1) the passage of a new environmental law 2) the passage of China’s first domestic violence law 3) reforms to China’s policing 4) reforms to administrative litigation (suing the government). The impact in terms of people asking and lawyers answering questions is then compared to other events in those fields, especially scandals, viral social media, and campaigns such as the rolling anti-pollution campaign. We find that these extra-legal events are more likely to sway not only the behavior of average Chinese, but also of lawyers’ likelihood of answering questions and that this is especially true of official campaigns. This finding calls into question both the depth and direction of China’s commitment to rule of law or even rule by law.

Authors

• John Wagner Givens, Spelman College

• Coraline Goron, Duke Kunshan University

• Suzanne E. Scoggins, Clark University