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

As I read Haiyan Lee's latest book, my social media feeds have been inundated with news, from home and abroad, of civil disputes, bureaucratic corruption, geopolitical clashes, intercontinental frictions, ecological calamities, and climatic devastation. These stories are gut-wrenching, but what troubles me more is the concept of justice underneath and the path to its seemingly impossible delivery. In vernacular Chinese, it is often heard from the victim's side of the Quiju-esque phrase tao ge shuofa 討個說法 (requesting an explanation) in the film Qiuju Goes to Court (Qiuju da guansi 秋菊打官司, 1992), a tuned-down euphemism of voicing inequality and demanding fair treatment. In Lee's phraseology, “shuofa can also be translated as justice” (274). In this connection, “begging for a shuofa” is synonymous with seeking a way of exacting justice. A more nuanced follow-up question arises: How is justice defined and served, whether morally or legally? To outline its different modes of manifestation and exaction, Lee offers her ambitious and illuminating unraveling of the tripartite entanglement, or what she terms the “three-body problem” that comprises law, morality, and justice.Guided by this triune compound, Lee's analytical framework borrows from Delia Lin's coinage of high versus low justice, of which “high justice is a moral doctrine that matters to the legitimacy and moral supremacy of the ruler and to the person in a social structure,” whereas “the demand for fair treatment of people and the idea of society as a fair system, which point to social justice, fall into the realm of low justice” (qtd. 5). With this conceptual binary, Lee extends their uses and structures her argument into six main chapters, the first two dealing, respectively, with high and low justice and chapters 3–6 attending to four additional forms of justice governed by the high-low dichotomy: transitional justice, exceptional justice, poetic justice, and multispecies justice. To dialogue with broader scholarship, Lee claims that “the book situates the social imaginary of law, morality, and justice at the intersection of literary studies, critical legal studies, moral and political philosophy, and cognitive psychology” (3). Given her strong research background in modern Chinese literature, Lee has decided to probe a body of texts that “defy genre rubrics and are not limited to the modern century of the People's Republic” (27), including socialist spy thrillers (or counterespionage novels), journalistic reportage, autobiographical and historical accounts, socialist realist literature, magical realist literature, and multispecies fictions, as well as stage, cinematic, and televisional adaptations. In the opinion of Lee, it is through the imaginary “narratives of crime and punishment, subterfuge and exposé, guilt and redemption” (10) that an evolving Chinese political-legal structure is refracted.Chapter 1 starts with a discussion of spy thrillers produced in the early socialist era (also known as the Seventeen Years, 1949–1966) and their contemporary progenies. Lee's fine-grained reading unfolds that “it is spy fiction that does the heavy lifting of reimagining the state as a surprisingly resilient power that was battered and weakened but not fundamentally vitiated” (46). The Chinese spy thriller, in contradistinction to the James Bond franchise, tellingly summarizes the socialist agenda: the Party-state “is itself both the fountainhead and the terminus of the highest form of justice” (68). Following this lead, chapter 2 redirects to the stories of dissemblance and duplicity. Lee reads these stories “both as a strategy of domination and as a tactic of resistance and subversion” (27), contouring how low justice is attainable when the governance of law is largely absent. Texts selected in this chapter straddle over a century, from Lu Xun's The True Story of Ah Q (1921) to Wen Muye's heart-piercing cinematic direction Dying to Survive (Wo bushi yaoshen 我不是药神, 2018).These two overarching chapters are fundamental to Lee's binary model, based on which Lee weaves the remaining four into her examination of Chinese justice ecology. Chapter 3 looks at “judicial populism” substantiated in the form of political/mass/judicial/public trials (150). Cases that are tried at different historical junctures are all considered to annotate transitional justice, which in Lee's taxonomy further bifurcates into revolutionary (high) justice and bureaucratic (low) justice. Chapter 4 deals with the lenient sentences of Japanese and Nationalist “war criminals” who later underwent experiments in thought reform (laogai 勞改, cf. the notorious “brainwashing,” which Lee cautiously differentiates herein), which eventually led all the accused to special pardoning and amnesty. Lee suggests the reforming experiment “was a program of (half) truth and reconciliation that worked effectively on the ground but was misrepresented in government propaganda with far-reaching implications” (28). Chapter 5 reads literature from socialist realism to magical realism, contending the swerve “is one form of unnatural narrative reacting against another form of unnatural narrative for the sake of truth and justice” (29). Chapter 6 decenters human agents in the Anthropocene and relocates Homo sapiens in an egalitarian multispecies community. Well aware of the predicament of these multispecies novels “having to use human language to conjure animal subjectivity,” Lee orientates the reader “to imagine human solidarity and redemption through the mediation of animals who are not reduced to a mere prop” (257).In the book's conclusion, Lee sketches out her central argument that justice is a vertical concept in China but a horizontal one in the United States. Lee further elaborates on the conceptual verticality, contending that instead of building a judicial infrastructure dedicated to procedural justice, the state prefers to retail substantive justice and accrue moral and political capital from each transaction. This vertical orientation of justice would be pushed to an extreme in Mao's China, where the morality of rule following was labeled xingshi zhuyi 形式主義 (formalism) and legal justice a bourgeois conceit and a tool of oppression. . . . In the era of socialist rule of law, the Party does have use for rule-based justice, but informality, opacity, and discretion are still at the heart of one-party rule. (266)Lee uses an arboreal metaphor to make sense of the Chinese political-legal structure, which she terms “the tree of justice” (285). This metaphor strikes me two ways. First, referring to tree as part of an ecological system (horizontal), it outlines the organic fabric among law, morality, and justice, all three inseparably framing Chinese legal imagination. Second, seen from the tree's trunk (vertical), what hangs from the thick boughs and what grows underneath the terrain not only metaphorically point to the high-low dichotomy but also insinuate the diversity of materials discussed in the book.Adopting a top-down angle, Lee indubitably designs and oxygenates a thriving vivarium that showcases the biodiversity of Chinese legal ecology and the imagination of multifarious justice. That being said, I have two concerns. First, has Lee's argumentation come to an end? Will a political exegesis suffice to envelop the case in its entirety? Back to my vivarium metaphor: What if we adopt a bottom-top approach to observing the same showcase? Will we draw anything different (exciting?) from previous findings? Lee's pyramidic model suggests that high justice has always been the grammar of Chinese political-legal discourse. Judging from Lee's (mostly) highbrow textual selection and ways of weaving materials, political criticism with an accented voice in high justice has sutured each chapter's fragmented arguments into a coherent manifesto. How about the disregarded middlebrow siblings? Will we detect any resonance or dissonance from the representation of justice in mass culture?My second concern regards the meteoric flaming dissidence that ferociously sweeps across the social media platforms in a short amount of time but is then quickly censored and erased—with “code 404 (NOT FOUND!)” the frequent sobriquet. Condoling the misfortune of the powerless and denouncing the misbehavior of the powerful can be an effective oxidizer to brew and invoke publicity crises, but unfortunately Chinese regulators tend to follow the center pillar doctrine “harmony above justice” (7) by removing all discordant voices from the platform with “a single crude chop” (yidao qie 一刀切). The irresponsible and peremptory surveillance and governance, as well as the failure of administrative aids to emotional catharsis, inevitably incubate various forms of grudge and resistance. It would thus be a very good entry point to take into consideration these protesting voices and resistant forms of circulation to complicate the picture of Chinese justice ecology.In overview, A Certain Justice challenges the ahistorical understanding of China's political-legal culture prevalent in the West and identifies the analytical failure of distinguishing high justice and low justice. Lee's convincing analysis recognizes the complicated evolution of the Chinese rule-of-law ideal at different historical junctures, holding into account multifaceted factors to gloss the tripartite entanglement among law, morality, and justice. Her predilection for politico-ideological wrestling might read a bit radical in places here and there, but it does not offset the book's elucidative power. To advance research pioneered by Lee, I suggest a bottom-up approach to detail the blueprint of Chinese justice ecology.