Dancing With Restorative Justice: Chinese Legal Professionals and Their Motivational Postures

ABSTRACT Drawing on an extension of Valerie Braithwaite's motivational postures theory (MPT), this study provides a nuanced examination of the implementation of restorative justice (RJ) by Chinese legal professionals, including police, prosecutors, and judges. Based on qualitative data from China, the study finds that the interaction among three different selves (moral, professional, and status‐seeking) determines the social distance legal professionals maintain from the various RJ programs they implement. By shifting MPT's focus from regulatees to regulators and introducing a professional self to capture role‐specific grievances and obligations, this extension illuminates how institutional and political constraints shape adaptive postures in top‐down systems. As a result, various legal professionals displayed four motivational postures—commitment, capitulation, resistance, and disengagement—toward RJ in different contexts. This study avoids a simplistic and narrow perspective on the institutionalization of RJ and provides valuable insights into improving policy designs and institutional structures. These improvements aim to foster less defiant and more accommodating postures among legal professionals toward RJ within the mainstream justice system.