Making legal space: case adjudication and court administration in China during the long 1980s

Thesis

This thesis examines how China’s courts were rebuilt as functioning judicial institutions during the long 1980s. Existing studies have often approached the post-Mao judiciary through normative legal analysis or broader accounts of intellectual debate, economic reform, and elite politics, leaving the administrative conditions of judicial work comparatively underexplored. The thesis argues that the judiciary’s reconstruction in the post-Mao era was shaped by a technocratic logic of problem-solving and administrative improvisation, through which court officials sought to build procedural regularity, professional identity, and institutional authority despite political pressures and limited resources. By examining adjudication, personnel training, budgeting, infrastructure and material conditions, the thesis shows how socialist legality was assembled through everyday practices rather than imposed through formal design. The analysis traces this reconstruction across three dimensions. First, the revival of socialist legality (shehui zhuyi fazhi) provided an aspirational framework that called for procedural regularity while continuing to emphasise Party leadership, generating expectations that were often difficult to realise in practice. Second, courts developed administrative arrangements, including training schemes and personnel systems that gave rise to a technocratic mode of everyday work and helped officials handle increasing caseloads and constrained authority through routinised and rule-bound practices. Third, the material and spatial conditions of adjudication, from courtrooms to uniforms, vehicles and firearms, shaped how authority could be presented and recognised, revealing how legality relied on pragmatic adaptation to funding and infrastructural limits. The thesis shows that legality in the reform era was built not through doctrinal reconstruction but through the technocratic organisation of judicial work, with authority resting on what could be administratively coordinated and materially sustained. This perspective highlights how courts made legality operational through incremental, pragmatic efforts to coordinate personnel, resources and space within the constraints of the Party-state.

Authors: Sun, W

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-nb6dj0dqj
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: legal materiality; post-Mao China; socialist legality; legal technocracy; Chinese courts; judicial administration
• Subjects: Technocracy; Legal History; History; Courts and Judicial Institutions; Modern Chinese History; Judicial Administration; State-building