A Certain Justice: Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination

Haiyan Lee's A Certain Justice brings together scholarship from numerous fields, including critical legal studies and moral philosophy, and a broad, rich array of cultural sources to give a nuanced and thoughtful portrait of Chinese imaginings of justice. In Chinese political-legal culture, Lee primarily sees justice as “vertical,” split into high justice and low justice (262). She explains that the conventional stereotyping of Chinese political-legal structures as Oriental despotism misunderstands the primacy of high justice—the priorities of a state that claims moral legitimacy—over low justice—the treatment and experiences of individuals. Lee contrasts this with the “horizontal” (262) justice of Euro-American states that prioritize liberal rule of law and “justice as fairness” (8).Lee uses an extensive and diverse range of literary and cultural sources, ranging from spy novels such as Mai Jia's In the Dark and films such as The Case of Huang Kegong (2014). The majority of the pieces she examines are from the People's Republic of China (PRC), although she also pulls examples from folktales, premodern Chinese literature, and Sinophone literature more broadly, including the Yuan play Rescriptor-in-Waiting Bao Thrice Investigates the Butterfly Dream and twenty-first-century Taiwanese novels. Lee uses these supplementary sources to bolster a continuity of Chinese ideas of justice across time, space, and state ideologies. Given that she assumes such relative coherence, she does not substantively deal with the differences between conceptions of justice and the political-legal system between Chinese dynastic states, the Republic of China, and the PRC. Lee contrasts Chinese ideas of justice with those of liberal, WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) conceptions of justice. Indeed, the book is nearly a comparative work, given the amount of space devoted to detailing Euro-American ideas of justice, morality, and the law.In chapter 1, Lee argues that spy novels remain a popular genre of Chinese literature because they are “the romance of the state par excellence” in which the state is imbued with moral superiority (33). She shows that in these novels, the enemies are always attacking high justice and all crimes are political. In contrast to these portrayals of the state as a politically pure apparatus always focused on high justice, in chapter 2 Lee looks to fiction to make clear the moral compromise and “subaltern hypocrisy” (72), or “moral opportunism” (80), that powerless individuals face in a society where the “law is largely absent or when it itself is the instrument of injustice” (72). She uses Lu Xun's character Ah Q as a prototypical example of the moral injury that afflicts powerless individuals. Lee also uses the public ritual of suku, or speaking bitterness, to illustrate the ways in which low justice—past individual wrongs—can often be attained only when converted into an issue of high justice—class struggle.In the following chapters, Lee looks at forms of justice beyond a binary of low and high justice. In chapter 3, Lee examines political trials from two different eras of political consolidation: mass trials carried out against landlords during land reform and the trial of the Gang of Four at the end of the Cultural Revolution, which she describes as transitional justice, although they do not neatly fit the conventional definition of the term. In contrast to these political trials that often ended in execution or incarceration, in chapter 4, she examines the relative mercy the state granted to war criminals from World War II and the Chinese civil war. Lee argues that the mild treatment and use of thought reform on these men constituted a form of “justice pursued in defense of legal sovereignty but operating outside the confines of positive law” (154).The most moving chapter concerns what Lee terms the people's justice and poetic justice. She looks at socialist realism of the Mao era and magical realism from the reform period, respectively, to illustrate these two forms of “compensatory justice . . . that the law cannot deliver” (190). In the section on magical realism, Lee uses Ma Jian's The Dark Road and Mo Yan's Frog to illustrate the tension between high justice and low justice inherent to the PRC population control policies. Lee carefully teases out the individual suffering and near-impossible pursuit of low justice under a policy motivated entirely on “demographic and developmentalist, or high justice, grounds” (209). However, in this chapter and in the book overall, the discussion gives scant attention to the ways that low justice is affected not only by high justice priorities but also by patriarchy, decollectivization, the introduction of the market economy, and other forces.In the final chapter, Lee looks at multispecies justice, through which the morality of humans and the “trophic order” of the nonhuman world must be negotiated (221). She opens up the examination of justice beyond a vertical concept in which the state's priorities take precedence over the lives of individuals, but this discussion is somewhat muddled. For this chapter, she uses novels from both the PRC and Taiwan that examine animals who have been “incorporate[ed] into [humanity's] moral life—as both agents and victims” (230). Three out of the four novels examined in the chapter grapple with colonialism and imperialism, and this theme threatens to overwhelm the chapter's stated focus on multispecies justice.This is a deeply thoughtful, ambitious work that reframes our understanding of justice in the Sinophone world, especially the PRC, and should be recommended to graduate students and scholars of any geographic specialization who are interested in the intersection of literature, history, philosophy, and legal studies.