Given its scale and central position in global supply chains, China is a significant actor in the global economy and an important destination for foreign investment. Alongside its sustained economic growth (averaging over 9 per cent annually since 1978 according to the World Bank), the development of China’s legal system has attracted increasing scholarly attention. This evolution cannot be characterised as mere window-dressing; substantive institutional changes have been realised across multiple areas. Yet China’s judicial reforms are embedded in distinctive political, cultural and social contexts, thus the Western analytical categories (such as rights-based adjudication, judicial independence and procedural justice) often offer limited explanatory value, particularly for readers trained in common law traditions. Against this backdrop, Professor Xin He’s The Judicial System of China offers a comprehensive and critical analysis of China’s judicial institutions and the rationales that have shaped their development over time.
The book comprises nine substantive chapters, preceded by an introduction and followed by a conclusion. Rejecting the conventional rights-based paradigm that presupposes an oppositional relationship between law and the state, the introductory chapter situates Chinese courts firmly within the state apparatus, emphasising their role in supporting governance objectives (p. 5). From this perspective, rights protection is not treated as the courts’ primary function; rather, judicial activity is directed towards the pursuit of state priorities, most notably the maintenance of social stability alongside other policy goals. Courts are thus required to implement policy as well as law, a dynamic that underscores their character as policy-implementing institutions. The prioritisation of policy over legal rules, however, generates inherent tensions with judicial legitimacy. As the author notes, this tension was starkly illustrated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when public health policy aimed at controlling the spread of the virus effectively prevented litigants from initiating legal proceedings. The book further demonstrates that, in responding to such legitimacy deficits, Chinese courts rely less on judicial independence or procedural justice than on alternative strategies, including substantive justice (particularly through mediation), efficiency, judicial democracy (for example, expanded participation by people’s assessors), and judicial transparency (evidenced by the large-scale publication of judgments and the live broadcasting of court hearings).
Chapter 1 traces the successive phases of China’s judicial reforms over the four decades since the policy of reform and opening-up in 1978, situating these developments within their broader political and social contexts. During the initial phase of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the principal concern was the availability of judges and basic court infrastructure. Under the leadership of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, reform priorities shifted towards judicial professionalism, particularly through raising judges’ educational qualifications. Although greater procedural formality and professionalisation were intended to enhance judicial legitimacy, they were perceived as posing risks to the party’s political legitimacy, as dissatisfied litigants increasingly petitioned higher-level authorities rather than accepting court decisions. Consequently, the earlier emphasis on professionalism and formalism was partially reversed. This shift was exemplified during Wang Shengjun’s tenure as president of the Supreme People’s Court (2008–13), when judges were instructed to treat litigants as “loved ones”, thereby distancing the judiciary from the image of a detached professional institution (p. 29). Correspondingly, while the mediation rate in civil cases declined from approximately 70 per cent in the mid-1980s to around 30 per cent by the mid-2000s, it rebounded to nearly 70 per cent in the early 2010s. The chapter also examines reform measures aimed at curbing local protectionism and other forms of local interference, together with the abolition of the case-approval system and efforts to dismantle hierarchical control within courts.
Chapter 2 focuses on judges in China. It begins with an analysis of the judges’ quota reform, designed to produce a more professional, standardised and elite judiciary, and which reduced the number of judges from approximately 210,000 in 2014 to around 120,000 in 2017. The author argues, however, that these reforms have not significantly enhanced the status of the judicial profession, particularly for rank-and-file judges. Heavy caseloads, combined with lifelong accountability for judicial decisions, have undermined their appeal. A notable achievement of the post-2014 reforms has been the decrease of illegitimate influence exercised through informal and private channels to advance personal interests. By contrast, influence exerted by court leadership (both within courts and from higher-level courts) and by government or party authorities in politically sensitive or high-profile cases (such as those implicating social stability, the image of the state, or senior officials) remains institutionally sanctioned. The chapter further examines the role of the Supervision Commission, established under the Supervision Law 2018, which exercises extensive oversight through inspections and the handling of complaints, and may impose disciplinary sanctions via internal party mechanisms within the courts. These institutional constraints help to explain why senior court officials have been prepared to delegate greater decision-making authority to frontline judges. The chapter concludes that expanded judicial autonomy is systematically balanced by heightened responsibility, enforced through ex post and external forms of control.
Chapter 3 examines the institution of people’s assessors, who possess the same decision-making authority as judges and participate in over 70 per cent of cases processed under the ordinary procedure (p. 71). The inclusion of lay participation in trials is thus presented as a mechanism for enhancing the legitimacy of both the courts and the state. After analysing the Law of People’s Assessors 2018 and the reforms it introduced, the author argues that the lowering of educational requirements and the introduction of random selection (measures intended to strengthen judicial democracy) have shifted the assessor role from a “professional” or full-time position to an “unprofessional” one. This change, he contends, increases the time judges must spend explaining legal issues, guiding questioning in hearings and engaging with assessors’ views during deliberations. Moreover, unlike Western jury systems, people’s assessors do not shield judges from responsibility for decisions rendered in court, and the institution is therefore not well received by both frontline judges and court officials. In practice, judges retain an effective monopoly over final decision-making, as the Law of People’s Assessors allows them to determine both the selection of assessors and the circumstances in which they participate, and many assessors remain unfamiliar with the basic facts and issues of the cases in which they sit. Consequently, the decorative nature of people’s assessors remains unchanged.
Chapter 4 examines the limited role of lawyers in Chinese courts across all types of proceedings. After briefly outlining the revival of the legal profession following its elimination during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), the chapter turns to “legal workers”, who are typically untrained and handle low-value cases that licensed lawyers avoid. Through the personal stories of three legal workers, the author illustrates how they operate and fill a gap in the provision of legal services. Because proceedings remain largely inquisitorial, judges rely heavily on their own questioning and exercise broad discretion in assessing evidence, meaning that lawyers often perform an advisory rather than adversarial function and litigants are frequently unrepresented in civil cases. In criminal proceedings, defence work is treated as a low-status segment of the legal market, and lawyers often prioritise rhetoric over evidential analysis, reflecting limited expertise beyond common-sense reasoning. Although judicial reforms have improved access to suspects, case files and evidence, defence lawyers remain marginal and their participation is often unwelcome. The chapter concludes by considering activist and human-rights lawyers, commonly known as weiquan lawyers, noting that under the leadership of Xi Jinping those who mobilise outside the courts have become increasingly intolerable to the authorities.
Chapter 5 begins by noting that widespread public mistrust of the law and the court system has led many Chinese litigants to place high hopes in guanxi (i.e. social network) and petitioning as alternatives to formal justice. In this context, securing the right guanxi – namely the individual who applies the law – can be seen as more important than the law itself, while petitioning to higher-level authorities remains a common recourse for those who have exhausted legal procedures but remain dissatisfied with court decisions. The chapter therefore argues that procedural justice provides little “cushion support” for litigants facing unfavourable outcomes; instead, perceptions of the courts are shaped primarily by distributive justice and the perceived fairness of substantive outcomes. Because Chinese courts are principally understood as instruments for implementing state policy, the author suggests that procedural justice is inherently limited: formal rules are likely to constrain judicial discretion, and therefore the development of sophisticated procedural norms or reliance on procedural justice as a primary legitimacy strategy remains unlikely, despite efforts to enhance legitimacy through judicial democracy, efficiency and transparency.
After examining judges, people’s assessors and lawyers, Chapters 6 to 9 turn respectively to civil trials, alternative dispute resolution, criminal justice and administrative litigation. Chapter 6 observes that civil and commercial cases account for roughly half of all cases heard by Chinese courts. Historically, judges bore primary responsibility for investigation and were required to seek out the truth. With the growth in caseloads and reforms to civil procedure, however, the burden of proof has shifted to litigants, and courts collect evidence directly only when necessary. Judges now primarily gather and test evidence during trial through questioning rather than through out-of-trial investigations. Although this shift may improve efficiency, judges remain sensitive to complaint and appeal rates as performance indicators (as discussed in ch. 2). Consequently, they are incentivised to pursue an “objective truth” aimed at preventing dissatisfaction, rather than a strictly legal truth, and substantive justice continues to shape judicial behaviour. This dynamic renders relevance and admissibility secondary considerations and, combined with judges’ concern about being criticised for mechanical application of rules, helps explain why the trial process remains inquisitorial despite the introduction of adversarial procedures in the statute books. The chapter also addresses the decline of local favouritism and the improved enforcement of judgments, noting that courts have deployed innovative tactics against debtors – alongside criminal charges, detention and monetary penalties – to secure compliance and thereby reinforce the legitimacy of the state.
Chapter 7 notes that pretrial mediation is court-supported and that a settlement reached through this process has the same legal effect as a final court judgment once verified by the court. It has proved an effective mechanism, resolving more than eight million disputes in 2021 alone (p. 155). The chapter also considers in-trial mediation, in which judges act both as adjudicators and mediators. Given judges’ dominant role in trials, this dual function affords them substantial leeway to shape settlements in line with their own preferences. Although arbitration is not discussed in this chapter, it does examine the enforcement of both international and domestic arbitral awards. Consistent with the courts’ policy-implementing role, the author argues that they support the development of an arbitration-friendly jurisdiction as part of the state’s broader economic development strategy, particularly to enhance foreign investor confidence.
Chapter 8, the longest chapter in the book, examines China’s criminal justice system. It opens by analysing the police, procuratorate and courts as an “iron triangle” operating under a pro-conviction ideology, in which the three apparatuses collaborate to secure convictions, producing conviction rates that at times approach 99 per cent. Rather than functioning in a relationship of mutual supervision, procuratorates and courts cooperate closely, with judges often presuming the reliability of prosecutorial evidence and subjecting defence challenges to heightened scrutiny, which further facilitates conviction (p. 168). The chapter then considers the evolution of the plea leniency system, which originated in expedited procedures for minor offences but has been elevated to a fundamental principle of criminal proceedings under the amended Criminal Procedure Law 2018. While the system has strengthened the position of procuratorates relative to the police by shifting the process from investigation-centred to prosecution-centred, it has further marginalised judges, whose role is largely confined to verifying the voluntariness, authenticity and legality of guilty pleas. Once a defendant admits guilt and accepts the proposed sentence, incentives for further investigation largely disappear, and the system relies heavily on confessions rather than evidentiary scrutiny. The chapter also examines the widespread use of criminal reconciliation, the centralised review of death penalty cases, and measures aimed at reducing wrongful convictions, identifying an overall trend towards judicial leniency. From a governance perspective, the author suggests that these reforms contribute to social stability and the enhancement of state legitimacy, but that they have not brought about corresponding improvements in the protection of individual rights. Structural imbalances between the prosecution and the defence remain evident, reinforced by defence lawyers’ limited specialist expertise and their tendency to defer to prosecutors, who exercise extensive discretion under the plea leniency regime. In practice, defence lawyers may therefore play a more limited advocacy role, at times assisting prosecutors in encouraging defendants to enter guilty pleas.
Chapter 9 examines administrative litigation, which accounts for less than 0.9 per cent of total caseloads but is presented as a form of public good. Amendments to the Administrative Litigation Law in 2014 lowered barriers to filing claims, while cross-jurisdictional arrangements contributed to an increase in plaintiffs’ success rates from 33.2 per cent in 2014 to 42.2 per cent in 2020 (p. 208). Although administrative litigation has attracted growing policy support as a mechanism for alleviating social conflict and holding government authorities accountable, the chapter finds that Chinese courts continue to face significant constraints in exercising robust judicial review. As apparatus of the state, courts must compromise and compete with other local government bodies and avoid confrontation with more powerful political actors. Moreover, laws and formal legislative instruments, as well as party actions, remain largely immune from judicial scrutiny. These limitations reinforce the book’s broader argument that administrative litigation, like other forms of litigation in China, functions primarily as an instrument of governance rather than a vehicle for the rights protection. Enhancing state legitimacy, rather than entrenching rights-based judicial review, remains the overriding consideration, particularly given that a strong system of judicial review would sit uneasily with the state’s economic development priorities.
The concluding chapter briefly synthesises the book’s central arguments, showing how a governance-based analytical framework offers a comprehensive account of China’s judicial system and illuminates the rationales underpinning its evolution over time. The author’s central message is clear: the ultimate function of Chinese courts lies in advancing state objectives of policy implementation and legitimacy enhancement, rather than in the protection of individual rights.
While the judicial reforms have increased judicial autonomy and professionalism, the book makes a convincing case that the Party is unlikely to endorse a Western-style judiciary empowered to interpret the law independently or to check other branches of government. Judges may therefore exercise a degree of independence in routine cases, but remain subject to party supervision when adjudicating politically sensitive matters. One dimension that may warrant further consideration in analyses of China’s judicial system is the influence of long-standing Confucian traditions and the associated cultural preference for wu song (the avoidance of litigation), which continue to shape societal expectations of courts and dispute resolution, including an emphasis on substantive justice over procedural justice and on the social effects of adjudication. It is also noteworthy that, on average, each of China’s approximately 126,000 judges resolves around 350 cases annually; unsurprisingly, efficiency has become a central institutional concern. While the book acknowledges these pressures in its assessment of judicial functioning, future research, particularly in light of China’s early adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in criminal justice and the nationwide “Smart Courts” strategy, might usefully examine the judicial deployment of AI-enabled tools (such as systems that recommend sentencing ranges, generate draft judgments based on structured inputs, or assist in case preparation), both for their efficiency gains and for their implications for arbitrariness and regional disparity in adjudication.
In conclusion, The Judicial System of China makes a valuable contribution to the comparative study of courts and judicial reform. By setting aside rights-centred and liberal-legal assumptions and adopting a governance-based framework, Professor He provides a nuanced and empirically grounded account of how China’s courts operate in practice and why reforms have unfolded as they have. The book is particularly effective in illustrating how extralegal factors shape judicial behaviour. It will be of considerable interest to scholars and students of Chinese law, comparative judicial politics and socio-legal studies, and offers a useful corrective to accounts that assess China’s judiciary primarily through Western legal paradigms.
