Ethan Michelson

Politics and Markets: Dual Transformations

The articles published in this issue of the Journal help advance the debate on market reform in former socialist states. In our comment, besides dealing with data analysis issues, we suggest several ways to improve the level of debate about substantive issues. These suggestions include more attention to politics, including path dependence, and more attention to middle-level generalizations from other developing market societies.

Climbing the Dispute Pagoda: Grievances and Appeals to the Official Justice System in Rural China:

In the wake of heightened scholarly and media attention to the growing volume of conflict in rural China, this article represents the first effort to use survey data to identify the causes both of popular grievances and of popular actions taken to resolve them in the Chinese countryside. An analysis of data collected in 2002 from almost 3,000 households across six provinces shows that the volume and character of grievances, as well as the volume of appeals to the official justice system, exhibited substantial variation both by macrolevel regional conditions and by microlevel family resources. With respect to regional variation, in contrast to classical theoretical expectations of a positive correlation between law and economic development, the data reveal that law was mobilized with greatest frequency in the most economically distressed parts of China where grievances were the most prevalent. Additional variation in the volume of legal mobilization between similarly aggrieved regions of similar economic character is explained by contextually-specific historical conditions. With respect to family resources, the survey evidence reveals that families with social connections to local government officials were relatively sheltered from grievances and relatively more likely to mobilize the official justice system when they did experience grievances.

Chinese Justice: Public Attitudes toward Official Justice in Beijing and Rural China

A major question in the law and society literature is the effect of legal experience on individual attitudes toward legal institutions, in particular the court system. Positive attitudes and confidence in the legal system are important for generating citizen trust and confidence in government generally and also for inculcating citizen values and behavior that support the rule of law and encourage legal (and peaceful) resolution of disputes and grievances more specifically. Thus, these values are important for sustaining democracy. For a country like China, in transition from state socialism, in which legal modes of governance and social control were less common than administrative edicts, Communist Party campaigns, and state repression, attempts to build an effective legal system are also linked to limited political reform. Rule of law building is the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) attempt to build more effective and efficient governance, while making an end run around democratization and the sharing of political power. In this case, creating positive citizen attitudes toward the legal system is part of a strategy to avoid democracy. In this chapter, we examine how experience with the legal system affects Chinese citizens’ evaluation of the courts through a series of comparisons between those who have used the law to resolve an employment dispute and those who have not as well as comparisons between disputants who remained positive and confident in the legal system and disputants who were fully disillusioned and negative. We find that legal experience leads to higher levels of disillusionment and more negative perceptions of the legal system’s effectiveness and fairness. Whereas nonusers tend to have vague but benevolent notions of the legal system and its effectiveness, actual disputants have less confidence in the effectiveness of the legal system.

Gender Inequality in the Chinese Legal Profession

In Chinas urban context of labor retrenchment, women are faring poorly relative to their male counterparts. Is the same true in Chinas incipient, dynamic, and expanding legal profession? Findings from four sources of quantitative data suggest that gender inequality in Chinas private and highly market-driven legal profession is a microcosm of larger patterns of female disadvantage in Chinas evolving urban labor market. Although employment opportunities for women lawyers have greatly expanded quantitatively, their careers are qualitatively less successful than those of their male counterparts in terms of both income and partnership status. In the Chinese bar, womens significantly shorter career trajectories are perhaps the most important cause of their lower incomes and slimmer chances of becoming a law firm partner. Future research must identify the causes of this significant career longevity gap between men and women in the Chinese legal profession.