Defying the Rules, Embracing the Court: “Paternalistic Enchantment” of Rural People in Eastern China

Based upon the authors’ empirical investigations in a Chinese people’s tribunal in rural Jiangsu Province, this paper presents the tribunal’s achievement of popularity and effective dispute resolution among legally uninformed lower class, discusses the tribunal’s impact on local legal consciousness through its unique “paternalistic enchantment”, and analyzes the consequent implications on Chinese legal consciousness studies.Existing literatures attribute Chinese people’s increasingly intensive employment of courts largely to the rise of their legal consciousness, and suggest that the judiciary is ineffective in protecting the rights of lower class with under-developed legal consciousness. In order to pursue justice, the lower class either have to equip themselves with legal weapons to fight in courtrooms, or to resort to government agencies, petitioning offices, or even the street protests.The empirical findings in this paper show a divergent picture. While the rural people observed defy the application of complex legal rules due to their lack of legal knowledge, many of them embrace the court for dispute resolution. The seemingly paradoxical situation is forged by the tribunal’s paternalistic adjudication approaches: judges are encouraged to work like local people’s “mother and father officials” and to marginalize certain legal rules to satisfy disputants. Under the circumstances, the lower class people are induced to hand over their disputes to the tribunal even if they are ignorant of the law.Inspired by Mary E. Gallagher’s concept of “informed disenchantment”, the authors describe the tribunal’s approach as “paternalistic enchantment”. Its implications are two-fold: the “paternalistic enchantment” does get rural people closer to the rule of law by combining the formal judicial system with the rural situational justice; the litigants, however, are not legally enlightened by their court experiences with their rights being unconsciously deprived.As regards the structure, this paper consists of six parts. Part I introduces the relevant literatures on legal consciousness. Part II explains the authors’ methodology. Part III presents the empirical status of the defiance and the embracement. Part IV discusses the “paternalistic enchantment” of the tribunal. Part V further analyzes the implications of the “paternalistic enchantment”. Part VI concludes.