Justice from Above or Below? Popular Strategies for Resolving Grievances in Rural China

Research on rural conflict in China suggests that village leaders are sources of trouble and obstacles to justice and that aggrieved villagers have more trust in and receive more satisfactory redress from higher-level solutions than from local solutions. In contrast to this account of ‘‘justice from above,’’ evidence presented in this article from a 2002 survey of almost 3,000 households supports an alternative theory of ‘‘justice from below.’’ According to this latter theory, the social costs associated with appealing to higher authorities, including the legal system, for help with local disputes tend both to discourage the escalation of disputes and to produce relatively disappointing experiences and outcomes when such routes are taken. Survey respondents indicated that local solutions, often with the involvement of village leaders, were far more desirable and effective than higher-level solutions. As social and political conflict intensifies in the Chinese countryside, villagers are escalating their disputes in growing numbers to higher authorities. Official efforts to control growing tensions in rural China include material concessions such as abolishing agricultural taxes as well as procedural reforms such as strengthening and expanding the courts and the official complaints system. This * The survey data on which this article is based were collected with the generous financial support of the Ford Foundation (Beijing); for this I owe a special thanks to Phyllis Chang and Titi Liu. I would also like to thank Feng Shizheng, Guo Xinghua, Han Heng, Li Lulu, Liu Jingming, Lu Yilong, Shen Weiwei, Wang Ping and Wang Xiaobei for making the data collection possible. I am grateful to Joshua Klugman and Jing Tong at Indiana University for their research assistance. Feedback and suggestions from Gardner Bovingdon, Lijun Chen, Neil Diamant, Sara Friedman, David James, Pierre Landry, James Lee, Sida Liu, Kevin O’Brien, Phillip Parnell, Brian Powell, Benjamin Read, Frank Upham, Jianxun Wang and Dali Yang greatly improved this article. Of course I remain solely responsible for all remaining defects and omissions. 1 Thomas B. Bernstein and Xiaobo Lü, Taxation without Representation in Contemporary Rural China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Thomas B. Bernstein, ‘‘Instability in rural China,’’ in David Shambaugh (ed.), Is China Unstable? (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2000), pp. 95–111; and Ian Johnson, Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China (New York: Pantheon, 2004). 2 Ray Yep, ‘‘Can ‘tax-for-fee’ reform reduce rural tension in China? The process, progress and limitations,’’ The China Quarterly, No. 177 (2004), pp. 42–70 and John James Kennedy, ‘‘From the feefor-tax reform to the abolition of agricultural taxes: the impact on township governments in north-west China,’’ The China Quarterly, No. 189 (2007), pp. 43–59. 3 YuenYuenTang, ‘‘Whenpeasants sue enmasse: large-scale collectiveALLsuits in ruralChina,’’China:An International Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2005), pp. 24–49 andCarlMinzner, ‘‘Xinfang: an alternative to formal Chinese legal institutions,’’ Stanford Journal of International Law, Vol. 42, No. 1 (2006), pp. 103–79. 43 # The China Quarterly, 2008 doi:10.1017/S0305741008000039 article compares the popularity and effectiveness of competing disputeresolution strategies from the point of view of the villagers who pursue them. How frequently do aggrieved villagers appeal to local authorities, mobilize the legal system or advance their claims to other authorities in the state bureaucracy? Do they evaluate local solutions more positively than higher-level solutions? Beyond their obvious policy relevance, answers to these questions also contribute to the growing scholarly literature on popular contention in rural China and to our theoretical understanding of access to justice more generally. Rightful Resistance in Rural China is the capstone of Kevin O’Brien and Lianjiang Li’s long-standing collaboration, the fruits of which have nourished the growth of research on rural conflict in China. Their contributions are both empirical and theoretical: they have developed a conceptual framework for making sense of their rich empirical findings on popular strategies for redressing grievances in the Chinese countryside. Because neither their primary research focus nor their primary research goal has been the evaluation of either the relative popularity or the relative effectiveness of competing strategies, this article builds on and extends the contributions of O’Brien and Li by tackling head-on the question of justice from above or justice from below. ‘‘Justice’’ here refers to the lay notion of obtaining satisfactory help in efforts to resolve grievances. Such a broad definition compels us to look in all the places to which – and at all the methods by which – villagers report pursuing remedies to their grievances. I present evidence from a survey of grievances and strategies of redress in rural China strongly suggesting that, ceteris paribus, local solutions are superior to higher-level solutions. Higher authorities appear no more successful than village leaders at satisfying the needs of complainants. Indeed, by some measures, higher authorities performed significantly worse than village leaders.