Book Review: Dispute Resolution in China: Litigation, Arbitration, Mediation, and their Interactions

Dispute resolution is one of the most enduring research topics in law and society research. While sociolegal scholars have long recognised the ‘dispute pyramid’ and how disputes emerge from social life and transform into legal cases in court, most studies focus on one or two specific sites or mechanisms of dispute resolution, such as mediation, arbitration, or litigation. Very few researchers have both the ambition and the capacity to paint a ‘world map’ of all the variations of dispute resolution in a single book, especially for a large country like China. Weixia Gu’s book Dispute Resolution in China is a notable exception. Based on her expertise in civil litigation, commercial arbitration, and various forms of mediation in China, Gu presents a panoramic account of the structures, processes and institutions of diverse systems of civil and commercial dispute resolution in Chinese law and how these systems respond to very different missions, incentives and social contextual factors. The book draws on a deep knowledge of Chinese law and society, articulates the precision of little-explored empirical data, as well as has the ambition and rigour of serious theoretical inquiries. Gu is perhaps also the first scholar to present this panoramic narrative and critical examination of China’s civil and commercial dispute resolution in an interactive ecology. It is an exemplary piece of scholarship in Chinese law written by one of the leading authorities in the field. Part I of the book lays out the landscape of Chinese dispute resolution, which ‘could be described as analogous to a dynamic ecology’ (p. 4). The three primary systems of civil and commercial dispute resolution are civil (including commercial) litigation, commercial arbitration, and mediation. Each system has its own architecture, procedural rules, and institutional settings. Furthermore, the three systems interact in complex ways on a regular basis, which produce many ‘hybrid’ forms of dispute resolution such as judicial mediation, judicial enforcement of arbitration, and ‘med-arb’ (see Chapter 8). Some of those hybrid forms are specific to the Chinese context (e.g. judicial mediation), while others are adopted from elsewhere (e.g. med-arb). Nevertheless, they constitute a heterogeneous and rapidly changing ecology for Chinese plaintiffs and defendants to navigate. In Part II, Gu provides a thorough examination of the historical evolution of each of the three main systems of dispute resolution from the 1980s to the present. With a delicate assembly and analysis of official statistics, combined with archival data and secondary literature, the three chapters on litigation, arbitration, and mediation offer perhaps the Book Reviews