Rolling Back Transparency in China\u27s Courts

Despite a burgeoning conversation about the centrality of information management to governments, scholars are only just beginning to address the role of legal information in sustaining authoritarian rule. This Essay presents a case study showing how legal information can be manipulated: through the deletion of previously published cases from China’s online public database of court decisions. Using our own dataset of all 42 million cases made public in China between January 1, 2014, and September 2, 2018, we examine the recent deletion of criminal cases from the China Judgements Online website. We find that the deletion of cases likely results from a range of overlapping, often ad hoc, concerns: the international and domestic images of Chinese courts, institutional relationships within the Chinese Party-State, worries about revealing negative social phenomena, and concerns about copycat crimes. Taken together, the decision(s) to remove hundreds of thousands of unconnected cases shape a narrative about the Chinese courts, Chinese society, and the Chinese Party-State. Our findings also provide insight into the interrelated mechanisms of censorship and transparency in an era in which data governance is increasingly central. We highlight how courts seek to curate a narrative that protects the courts from criticism and boosts their standing with the public and within the Party-State. Examining how Chinese courts manage the removal of cases suggests that how courts curate and manage information disclosure may also be central to their legitimacy and influence

The Sovereignty of the War Dead: Martyrs, Memorials, and the Makings of Modern China, 1912-1949

The anti-imperial uprisings, the warlord power struggle, the War of Resistance, and the Chinese Civil War took twenty to thirty million lives. Half of the casualties were civilian. Republican China, not unlike the Union government during the American Civil War and the European states during the First World War, began to manage the war dead. My dissertation, titled “The Sovereignty of the War Dead: Martyrs, Memorials, and the Makings of Modern China, 1912-1949,” examines Republican China’s effort to collect, commemorate, and compensate military and civilian dead in the first half of the twentieth century. I analyze how various government policies, such as the construction of martyrs’ shrines in every county, the tracking of casualties by locality, the compilation of martyrs’ biographies, and the distribution of gratuities to families of the war dead, contributed to the processes of state-building and nation-making in China and shaped China’s social and cultural institutions in most profound ways. The toppling of the Manchu ruling class and the Confucian-educated elites did not lead to the construction of China as a nation of equal citizens. Republican China instead developed new political hierarchies through the promulgation of different regulations for compensating revolutionary predecessors, Party members, servicemembers, and bureaucrats, and their families exclusively. Conflicts of the unprecedented scale prompted the Nationalist state to extend its constituency by broadening the criteria for martyrdom to include civilians and pledging to provide for qualified bereaved family members. In exchange for recognition and compensation, family members had to demonstrate not only their allegiance to the party-state, but also their compliance to the moral codes prescribed by the state. As for the dead, their spirits dwelled in government-mandated Loyal Martyrs’ Shrines (zhonglie ci), where the living performed a combination of traditional and modern rituals to memorialize their untimely departure.My dissertation advances our understanding of violence in the modern age. In twentieth-century China, conflicts were viewed as rational political choices, inevitable in the modern age, and inseparable from human experience, laying the rhetorical ground for further violence. Examining the changes in compensation and commemoration law from the 1910s to 1940s, I demonstrate that two processes – the bureaucratization of death (the construction of deaths with numbers and formulaic narratives) and the civilianization of war (increased presence of civilians in war as victims, supporters and penetrators) – contributed to the routinization of violence in postwar China. Political struggles from the 1950s to the present testify to how wars of earlier decades have normalized death in the cultural, social, and economic realms. Furthermore, I propose that the dead have sovereignty as their oft-perceived formidable power in the afterlife necessitates that political, social, and cultural institutions develop the means to control the way by which they are remembered. The sheer number of the dead, the eerie specter of their wronged souls, and the multiplicity of their memorialized identities upset the core of human existence

The Emperor’s Coffer: The Qing Imperial Fiscal Separation Between Privy Purse and State Treasury (1644-1912)

This dissertation examines the imperial fiscal arrangement during the Qing dynasty that separated the privy or crown’s purse from the state treasury. In my dissertation, I argue that while the distinction between public and private finance has long been identified in European studies as an important sign of the rise of modernity, similar fiscal arrangements in China arose from the crown’s endeavor over several decades to consolidate authority first over the nobility and then over the Chinese state. I see dynamics of this separation as deeply rooted in China’s longstanding patrimonial bureaucratic rule. The continued functioning of the imperial state system into the Qing, a dynasty founded by non-Han rulers, thus suggests the remarkable resiliency of Chinese political traditions despite dramatic institutional changes brought by alien conquest. This dissertation is composed of an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction sets out the reasons why the public/private divide structure does not necessarily mean the rise of modernity and demonstrates how the separation was both indicative of and shaped by China’s longstanding patrimonial bureaucratic rule. Chapter 1 discusses the role played by Nurhaci’s economic strategies in the rise of Manchu power. Understanding the emergence of the imperial fiscal separation in the Manchu state formation process, Chapter 2 discusses how the establishment of the bureaucracy helped the throne win over the Manchu nobility and how the establishment of the bureaucracy as the new foundation of the imperial authority transformed the nature of the privy purse. Chapter 3 examines the formalization of the imperial fiscal separation and its functions, looking especially at how the consolidation of the Qing rule and the expanded territories under the imperial control shaped both source of privy revenues and imperial spending behaviors. Chapter 4 unveils the expansion of privy revenues during the eighteenth-century economic prosperous era both as the consequence of the political centralization and as the instrument of releasing fiscal and military dynamisms of the centralized crown. Chapter 5 discusses how the unprecedented duration and intensity of the Taiping Rebellion not only disrupted the traditional fiscal relationship between central and provincial governments, but also broke down the traditional fiscal separation between the central government and the imperial household. Chapter 6 examines the court’s effort to codify imperial fiscal separation into the constitution in last few years of the dynasty as its last attempt to revive centralized imperial power and how such efforts provoked even more vigorous elite protests and facilitated the dynastic downfall. The conclusion summarizes arguments of each chapter and unfolds the significance of this study on our understanding of the nature of the Qing rule and modernity in Chinese history