Number 9

Legal Dialogue, Chinese Style

Legal scholars in China generally refrain from criticizing official policies in public. Qin (Sky) Ma writes that scholars’ response to the feared shutdown of the China Judgments Online (中国裁判文书网) at the end of 2023 was a noteworthy deviation from the norm. It showed that the space for critical discourse, though constrained, is not entirely closed and that strategic engagement by scholars can have impact. 

The Long Road to Ending Gendered Violence in China

In June 2022, a group of men violently attacked four women at a barbecue restaurant in Tangshan, China, after one of the women rejected a pickup attempt. Video of the attack went viral. What happened next revealed the problem at the heart of gendered violence in China: instead of acknowledging the role gender played in the attack, authorities treated it as a case of gang criminality.