Blood Money and Negotiated Justice in China

Despite the fact that criminal reconciliation is key to understand the current policy “Balancing Leniency and Severity” in China’s criminal justice, the existing literature has rarely examined the factors that affect its process and outcome. To fill the gap, this Project will expand our preliminary study to six courts with their representative profiles of different levels of caseload, court hierarchy, economic and institutional development, political pressures, and judicial professionalism. Drawing upon court ethnography and interviews with relevant judges, victims, defendants, and their family members, this Project will explore the impact of two categories of factors—social and political—on the operation of China’s criminal justice. The findings of this Project are critical to understand how criminal justice is exercised in Chinese courts. This focus on actual criminal court practices in turn allows us to explore how the patterns of criminal law practice affect the realization of legal rights and the underlying social and political forces shaping it. The Project will not only generate policy recommendations for reforms to the criminal procedure in China, but also provide evidence for broader theoretical debates about the relationship between law, money, politics, and perception of justice.