Justice In China Research Articles

Provincial equity and enhanced health are key drivers for China's 2060 carbon neutrality

China's ambitious 2060 carbon neutrality target necessitates innovative strategies to address the country's status as the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter. This study employs the Global Change Analysis Model to develop a provincial-differentiated control strategy (EQU scenario) that not only aims to meet the national carbon neutrality goal but also enhances population health and environmental equity. The EQU scenario forecasts substantial reductions in average population weighted PM2.5 and O3 concentrations to 7 μg/m3 and 34 ppb, respectively, by 2060. In comparison to a baseline scenario (NEU), the EQU scenario offers more equitable air quality improvements and significant health benefits, potentially preventing 39 thousand PM2.5-related and 10 thousand O3-related premature deaths, with minimal additional cost. The Gini coefficient, indicating CO2 emission distribution inequality among provinces, is projected to decrease from 0.58 in NEU to 0.37 in EQU. This scenario anticipates about one-third of provinces achieving carbon neutrality by 2060, with a harmonized provincial carbon neutrality capacity. The study highlights the critical importance of integrating provincially differentiated controls within national decarbonization strategies, advancing equitable deep decarbonization and reinforcing environmental justice in China.

The application of restorative justice in China’s environmental crime: an evolutionary game perspective

The application of restorative justice in China’s environmental crime: an evolutionary game perspective

Temporary Trust: Legal Cynicism, Protection, and the Paradox of Victim Participation in Justice

Victims in China, including sexual victims, often distrust legal institutions yet continue to seek protection from them. However, few studies have examined why and how this so-called paradox has emerged in the Chinese context. Drawing on including in-depth interviews with victims of sexual harassment, this study illuminates how sex victims persist in calling on the police and relying on legal authorities despite the widespread cynicism toward them. The analysis suggests that victims ultimately turn to legal agencies because they have fairly limited options for seeking justice in China, where the provision of victim services through non-state channels is severely inadequate. By temporarily turning to legal authorities, victims are at least made visible and heard by the state. Despite stigmatizing and burdensome experiences with the law, they participate in the justice system merely for recognition and tangible protection, leaving them with no “way out” and exacerbating their disadvantages in society.

From Nurture to Deviance: A Study on Parenting Style and Juvenile Delinquency

ABSTRACT Drawing on data and quantitative analysis from the 2019 Recidivism Survey conducted by the Ministry of Justice in China, this study unveils a significant correlation between parenting styles, parent-child relationships, and juvenile delinquency. Negative parenting practices can lead to increased anxiety or a lack of self-control, especially in scenarios characterized by inadequate parental supervision. This shortfall in self-regulation is directly associated with a surge in criminal behavior among adolescents, thereby elevating the risk of engaging in delinquent activities. Furthermore, poor parent-child relationships exacerbate the adverse effects of insufficient parental oversight on juvenile misconduct. Youths with diminished social and emotional bonds to their parents are more susceptible to diverging from societal norms and participating in delinquent behaviors. Therefore, effective intervention strategies aimed at curbing juvenile delinquency should focus on improving parental supervision and guidance while simultaneously nurturing positive parent-child relationships.

How Justice Is Our Energy Future? Assessing the Impact of Green Finance on Energy Justice in China

Ensuring energy justice is crucial for achieving social stability and realizing low-carbon development. Accordingly, we estimate the effect of green finance (GF) on energy justice in China and further explore its influencing mechanisms using the system-generalized method of moments (SYS-GMM). For this purpose, we first assess the levels of energy justice across 30 Chinese provinces. The main results show the following: (1) China’s energy justice index generally shows an upward trend during the observation period. (2) GF can directly promote China’s energy justice, mainly by increasing procedural justice, recognition justice, and restorative justice. (3) GF also indirectly increases energy justice by promoting environmental regulation and green total factor productivity (GTFP). (4) The effect of GF on energy justice is heterogeneous and asymmetric. Specifically, it is more pronounced in southern China, regions with low GF indexes, and regions with high energy justice indexes. This study’s findings enrich the existing literature and provide policy implications for China’s realization of energy justice.

Energy and Environmental Justice in China: Literature Review and Research Agenda

Energy and environmental justice (EEJ) is an interdisciplinary field of study that examines the social, economic, and political dimensions of energy and environmental transitions. Studying EEJ in China is crucial as the country accelerates its transition towards environmental sustainability and carbon neutrality, highlighting the need for the development of more equitable energy and environmental policies. This paper offers a comprehensive review of academic research on EEJ in the Chinese context. Our review indicates that Chinese EEJ scholarship has identified instances of injustice in China's energy and ecological transitions and highlighted specific characteristics, including regional disparities, urban-rural inequality, and the disproportionate impact on migrant populations. However, the tendency to apply Western justice principles (e.g., distributive, recognition, and procedural justice) undermines the appreciation of the diverse and contextual interpretations of justice-related research in China. Furthermore, there is a lack of critical justice research that explores the root causes of injustice in China. The review suggests that future research can advance theoretical development by conducting cross-cultural studies, while also adopting a more critical approach that foregrounds the role of power in reproducing injustice. This review is useful for those interested in researching the social justice dimensions of energy and ecological transitions in China.

Envisioning a credit society: social credit systems and the institutionalization of moral standards in China

China’s Social Credit System (SCS) has been widely considered a centralized surveillance project, whereas recent research found multiple scoring systems co-existing in various fields at multiple administrative levels and in diverse forms. Despite the broadened view toward the complexity of SCS, these research projects continue to focus on SCS mainly as political and digital control mechanisms. Instead, this paper is interested in the social and cultural meanings of SCS constructed in the media, both at the national and local levels. Based on the analyses of news reports since the year 2003, when the term SCS was officially coined, this paper examines the historical narratives about SCS, including its rationales, stakeholders, and intended goals/tasks. It argues that the SCS construction has been a societal project anchored in a distinct moral orientation of financial credit. While credit systems are often used to classify consumers and financial subjects in Western contexts, the case of Chinese SCS shows that the moral dimension of financial credit scoring has enabled its spread into other non-financial domains. Also, the institutionalization of such moral standards is considered an effective approach to addressing various socio-economic and ethical issues that have long baffled economic development and social justice in China’s reform era.

Does Internet Connect to Social Justice Perception in China?

The world has witnessed an important and dramatic transition during the past decades, with social and economic challenges related to the advancement of digital technologies. Meanwhile, inequalities of distributions of resources and opportunities obstinately exist around the world. This study innovates by utilizing household survey datasets to empirically evaluate the impact of Internet utilization on individual’s perception toward social justice in China. Estimates suggest that Internet utilization generates a significant negative effect on perceived social justice (in general, −5%). In China, there are 1.032 billion Internet users by the end of 2021, accounting for 73% of the total population (China Internet Network Information Center). It suggests that 3.65% of the population, around 5 million people, might consider the current society is injustice if all circumstances remain unchanged. For robustness checks, we not only run multivariate regressions, implemented different model specification, and used alternative measures as well as datasets, but also approached instrumental variable estimation with regional rainfall for causal inference. Consistent conclusions are found. Also, we found stronger negative effects among male, eastern provinces, and urban area samples. To the end, our results shed lights on policy implication, for example, Internet associated public interventions can be focused on justice cultivation and information transparency.

BERT_LF: A Similar Case Retrieval Method Based on Legal Facts

With the development of smart justice in China, the Supreme People’s Court implements the system of compulsory retrieval for similar cases continuously and comprehensively, more and more judicial big data has been continuously disclosed, and the application of case retrieval is more extensive, and then, the accuracy of similar case search results needs to be urgently improved. Legal case retrieval is a special search task; for a given query case, it refers to the searching for similar cases. Different from traditional text search, legal case retrieval has different characteristics and greater challenges, for its query case is longer and more complex than common keyword queries and short article queries. In addition, the definition of dependencies between query cases and candidate cases differs from general dependencies based on text or topic. In order to solve these problems, we propose a method for similarity case retrieval based on the legal facts, and our model combine the topic distribution and legal entity facts to make the document representation vector more suitable for legal scenarios. At the same time, the method of paragraph aggregation based on BERT is used to encode context semantic information and solve the problem of long text. The experimental results show that our method is superior to the existing method.

Social justice in China’s cities: Urban-rural restructuring and justice-oriented planning

Research on China’s urban planning sector has largely focused on its role in delivering economic growth and state objectives. Yet China’s urban planning practices are producing new forms of social injustice, which few studies explicitly examine. The paper details three types of social injustice stemming from urban planning and urbanization processes: 1) economic disparities related to land and housing dispossession and speculation, 2) dissolution of social networks and relative precarity for rural-to-urban resettlement migrants, and 3) in-situ marginalization for residents excluded from urban planning. It further proposes that these types of social injustice can be addressed through distributional, participatory, and recognition-oriented mechanisms. Centering justice can reconfigure the aims, processes, and outcomes of planning practice, thereby reducing inequalities embedded within China’s urbanization. Without deprioritizing economic growth and state-led entrepreneurialism, however, justice-oriented planning can offer but partial remedies. The conclusion discusses pathways for researchers and planners to contribute to a just planning transition and advance social justice in China’s cities.

Measuring the Loss of Justice in China's Rural Energy Transition: A Case Study of Natural Gas Replacing Bulk Coal for Heating in Hebei Province

Measuring the Loss of Justice in China's Rural Energy Transition: A Case Study of Natural Gas Replacing Bulk Coal for Heating in Hebei Province

Analyse Comparative / Comparative Perspectives

In the time of a global pandemic, it is hardly possible to insist on regular judicial activities in most cases. Rather, many jurisdictions have had to adjust to the usage of online dispute resolution (ODR), which has also been adopted by the Chinese court system. China is running an ongoing reform experiment, which has a separate part on improving electronic litigation. Among others, the filing of civil lawsuits, submission of evidence and the proceedings of hearings have special arrangements compared to ordinary civil justice. Although internet justice in China has proved itself to be a very successful system which is still developing rapidly, it definitely encounters some difficulties and challenges too. There may be specific fields in which ODR has been proved especially effective at resolving disputes, and, on the other hand, some types of cases that are not suitable for being tried online. The principle of due process requires the internet-based judiciary to provide a suitable dispute resolution mechanism. Improper behaviour during online hearings need to be addressed. Special procedural and evidential difficulties arise in electronic proceedings which call for specific solutions. It is ODR which must be fit for circumstances in the national context, and not the other way around.

Exploring the health effects of neighborhood greenness on Lilong residents in Shanghai

With increasing focus on the associations between green space and the health of disadvantaged groups such as the elderly, children, and low-income people, there is still inconsistent evidence in the literature from the perspective of environmental justice in China. Thus, this study re-examines the impact of green space on self-rated health, mental health and physical capability based on a comprehensive survey of Lilong communities in Shanghai in 2016. We employed several types of greenness indicator at the community level, including park accessibility, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), eye-level green visibility, and satisfaction with neighborhood green-space provision. Our results show that there is no significant relationship between neighborhood greenness and Lilong residents’ general health, with neighborhood greenness more strongly associated with Lilong residents’ mental than physical health. For vulnerable neighborhoods, of the various greenness assessment metrics studied, self-reported satisfaction with the level of greenness is shown to have the most consistent positive effect on people’s health outcomes.

Public Opinion and Social Justice in China

Public Opinion and Social Justice in China

Authoritarian environmentalism, just transition, and the tension between environmental protection and social justice in China's forestry reform

Authoritarian environmentalism (AE) has become an important source of social injustice in China. Taking clues from the theory of just transition and a case study of forestry reform in Northeast China, this article discusses the tension between environmental protection and social justice in Chinese AE. From a procedural perspective, the belief in insulated eco-elites being best placed to make environmental decisions, and the emphasis on policy expediency, are manifested in the top-down imposition of a sweeping ban on logging of natural forests. However, this non-participatory approach prevents critical and nuanced viewpoints on local impacts to be recognized and addressed. From a distributional perspective, while AE does not inherently contradict the norm of distributive justice, the forestry reform has negatively affected the undercompensated and under-supported laid off workers, created new energy poverty issues, undermined local public services, and disproportionately affected smaller, remote communities, some of whom have been outright abandoned. The findings highlight the need for scholars to engage with social justice issues in AE by championing the importance of a just transition process, experimenting with public engagement in the context of authoritarianism, and generating policy knowledge that facilitates the transformation toward sustainability.

Transnational judicial dialogue in the rise of China: how the Chinese judiciary enhances the Belt and Road Initiative

ABSTRACT Transnational judicial dialogue, initially treated by Anne-Marie Slaughter as a separate theoretical issue, refers to an inter-state engagement that is of growing importance in globalization. Given that China’s longstanding judicial philosophy is highly attentive to the national development strategy, the judiciary immediately devoted itself to enhancing the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – China’s new strategy for engaging with globalization and pursuing its ambition of rising as a leading world power. Transnational judicial dialogue may help improve understanding of the delivery of justice in China and exhibit Chinese ‘judicial wisdom’ to other BRI countries, thereby increasing confidence in the Chinese judiciary while enhancing judicial cooperation between China and other BRI countries. Dialogue may also help other BRI countries better understand China’s national development and foreign policies. Chinese transnational judicial dialogue has its own characteristics, especially in relation to face-to-face programme ‘training’ or yanxiu, provided for foreign judges. This article surveys the diversity and significance of transnational judicial dialogue in a globalized context. In particular, it demonstrates that an assertedly non-liberal state can also become a major player in transnational judicial dialogue and benefit other states, at least in some aspects. Chinese transnational judicial dialogue sheds light on the strengths and weaknesses of Slaughter’s theory.

Legal aspects of judicial protection of citizens’ rights and public interests in the field of environmental protection in the people’s Republic of China

This article examines the judicial procedure for protecting the rights of citizens and public interests in the field of environmental protection in the People's Republic of China. The author analyzed the regulatory legal acts of China that regulate the activities of specialized courts for environmental protection. In the course of the research, the features of the creation of such courts are revealed, as well as the analysis of judicial practice on the consideration of disputes in the field of environmental protection is presented. Besides, it is established that only public organizations and prosecutor's offices are authorized to file lawsuits in the specialized courts for environmental protection in defense of public interests in the field of environmental protection. At the same time, the current legislation does not provide for citizens to apply to them, since everyone's environmental rights are generally protected by applying to the people's courts of the People's Republic of China. As a result of the research, the author came to the conclusion that the reform of environmental justice in China continues in the direction of legal regulation of the activities of specialized courts for environmental protection. At the same time, the chinese experience of protecting public interests in the field of environmental protection by public organizations or prosecutor's offices in environmental courts allows us to note an improvement in the quality of justice and progress in the consideration of this category of cases, since decisions are made by judges with special knowledge in this area. While the current legislation of China does not establish the specifics of protecting environmental rights by citizens in a General manner by applying to the people's courts of the People's Republic of China.

The Tongpo case: indigenous institutions and environmental justice in China

ABSTRACT Environmental conflict between indigenous peoples and state agencies developing natural resources has become a global phenomenon. This article presents a compelling but underreported incident of environmental conflict in China. The Tongpo case describes a struggle between a Mongol pastoral people who worship and protect their sacred mountain and a Han Chinese natural resource development company that began constructing a coking mill at the foot of this mountain in late 2005. This paper gives a detailed account of the origins, development, and impact of the Tongpo case from the perspective of indigenous environmental justice. It focuses on two related subjects: how Mongol indigenous institutions in China have protected the environment, and how environmental injustice has occurred at the local level in China. By applying an indigenous environmental justice lens to this case study, this paper exposes how environmental injustice is manifested through internal colonialism, nationalism, and racism and illuminates the ways in which indigenous groups protect their sacred lands.

Towards Online Dispute Resolution-Led Justice in China

Towards Online Dispute Resolution-Led Justice in China

The Dynamic between Love and Justice

The dynamic between love and justice raised by Reinhold Niebuhr points to the possibility of transforming justice by love while acknowledging the distance between the two. This position has recently been challenged by Nicholas Wolterstorff’s idea of “love incorporating justice.” This article reexamines this dynamic between love and justice in the Chinese context, introducing Confucian alternatives to Western-style political order (in the version of the “Confucian constitutionalism” of Qing Jiang) to the Western theory of justice (in the version of the “Chinse theory of justice” of Yushun Huang), and to avoid the conflict between love and justice (in terms of the “Confucian love with distinction” of Yong Huang). This article argues that to explore social justice in China the concepts of love—both Confucian ren and Christian agape—can make their own contributions, demanding just institutions while revealing human limitations.