The Past and Present of the Chinese Civil and Criminal Justice Systems

Abstract

This article starts with the entirety of the Chinese “justice system,” past and present, to reconsider informal justice (among the people) and formal justice (of the state), emphasizing especially the interdependence, overlap, and interaction of the civil and criminal justice systems. It then compares the justice system to the analytical framework employed by the “Rule of Law Index” of the World Justice Project (WJP), to bring out the similarities and differences between the “Sinitic legal tradition” and modern Western justice, and also the sharp contrasts between Chinese mediation and Western “alternative dispute resolution” (ADR). The purpose of the article is to demonstrate how a number of influential common assumptions are mistaken, and how the Sinitic legal tradition remains important in contemporary justice, not just of China but also the other major “East Asian civilization” countries. The purpose is to search for a path that would go beyond the either/or binary opposition between the Chinese and the Western, and the past and the present.