Has Citizen Activism Led to Increased Numbers of Chinese Court Cases?

Actually, no. There have been several references recently to the "skyrocketing" or "rapidly increasing" caseload of Chinese courts as a result of increased citizen legal activism. But the numbers just don't support this.

True, the annual work reports of the Supreme People's Court over the last ten years do seem to reveal a substantial increase in the total number of Chinese court "cases" since the mid-1990s. But careful analysis of the numbers reveals that this is actually an artifact of what judicial authorities are counting as a "case." Numbers of civil cases (citizens suing each other) and administrative cases (citizens suing the state) have remained relatively stable, or even declined, compared to levels reached in the 1990s.

Professor Ben Liebman of Columbia Law School has done some very good work on this subject, has spoken about it at a conference held at the Center for Strategic and International Studies last December, and has a piece coming out in an upcoming version of the China Quarterly. See his work for more detailed information. The following are just a few of my thoughts to answer questions I've received recently. 

Let's start with the total number of court cases reported in the 1997, 2000, and 2007 Supreme People's Court (SPC) work reports. These reports contain judicial statistics for the year immediately prior to that they were released, i.e. 1996, 1999, and 2006, respectively. Each of these reports provides an annual total for the number of cases handled by the courts in that year. For the three years, these total numbers are:

1996 5,264,619

1999 5,692,000

2006 8,105,007

So doesn't that reflect a rapidly increasing number of cases in the Chinese courts? Well, not quite. First, one has to look at the precise definition of what this total reflects. For 1996 and 1999, the number above represents the total of "first-instance trial cases" (一审案件), while the 2006 number reflects "all cases" (各类案件). What's the difference? Well, the big difference is that the 2006 number also includes cases handled by the enforcement (执行tribunals of the Chinese courts, in addition those handled by criminal, civil, administrative tribunals. [Enforcement tribunals are internal judicial enforcement authorities charged with enforcing the verdicts issued by other tribunals, such as civil judgments compelling one party to pay monetary compensation to another.]

Total number of cases handled by the enforcement tribunals for the three years are:

1996 1,374,012

1999 2,645,000

2006 2,149,625

If one wishes to accurately compare the total judicial caseloads of Chinese courts for each of these years, the reasonable thing to do is to include the above numbers into the "total" figures for 1996 and 1999 (again, they've already been included in the 2006 figures).   This generates the following numbers:

1996 6,638,631

1999 8,337,000

2006 8,105,007

The total caseload of Chinese courts has changed less significantly than the initial numbers suggest. The above comparison also reveals that the substantial increase in the caseload of the Chinese judiciary between 1996 and 1999 is not primarily the result of an increased number of civil, criminal, or administrative lawsuits, but rather a larger workload of the enforcement tribunals. 

Comparing the total numbers of first-instance (trial) administrative, civil, and criminal cases across the three years offers an even better understanding of shifting judicial caseloads. Below are the charts for the total number of cases broken into their major component sections.

 

                                               

	1996	1999	2006
First-instance civil	3,083,388	3,517,000	4,382,407
First-instance economic	1,500,647	1,543,000
First instance criminal	572,058	539,000	701,379
First instance administrative	79,527	98,759	95,052
Enforcement	1,374,012	2,645,000	2,149,625

 

The above chart presents another problem of terminology to resolve.  Chinese courts in the 1990s contained "economic" tribunals that handled cases of "economic law" - involving issues such as intellectual property.

Chinese courts abolished their economic tribunals around 2000, and merged them with civil tribunals, noting the fact that cases handled by both tribunals involved civil law issues, and that the precise distinction between these cases was unclear in practice.  Chinese judicial statistics in the SPC work reports for 2001 and later do not break out "economic" cases as a separate category, folding them into the statistics for civil cases.

Consequently, as a proxy for comparing types of cases between the different time periods, one can add together the economic and civil cases for 1996 and 1999 to arrive at an estimate of "civil" cases.  Doing so generates the following chart:

 

                                       

		1996	1999	2006
	First-instance civil + economic	4,584,435	5,060,000	4,382,407
	First-instance criminal	572,058	539,000	701,379
	First-instance administrative	79,527	98,759	95,052
	Enforcement	1,374,012	2,645,000	2,149,625

    Note that these numbers appear to indicate that the number of cases in Chinese courts involving issues of civil law has remained relatively constant, or even declined, since the mid-1990s.  Further, the number of administrative law cases, while higher than in the mid-1990s, has declined from levels reached in the late 1990s.  In contrast, the numbers of criminal cases have climbed.  [Ben Liebman reaches similar calculations after a much more thorough set of calculations based on statistics from the Law Yearbook - the above is simply back of envelope work from the SPC work reports. Some of the numbers appear to differ slightly, but don't lead to different conclusions.]

    What's the implication of this? Well, it suggests that you're not necessarily seeing a large increase in the use of the courts as a locus for people seeking to resolve their grievances against each other (civil cases) or their grievances against the state (administrative cases).  Moreover, some of the above numbers indicate that there's actually something of a decline in citizen use of the courts as a means to resolve these types of grievances. 

    So what? Courts and lawyers aren't necessarily the best way to resolve problems.  True.  But as the numbers of civil and administrative court cases have stagnated over the past decade, numbers of  petitions and mass incidents have surged (or at least, they did until about two years ago, when the official information released on these incidents became a lot less transparent).   

    Chinese leaders themselves note that China's rapid increase in population, urbanization, and levels of economic development over the last decade has generated increasing levels of social conflict and discontent.  But continued tight political controls exercised by local Party leaders over local courts and people's congresses limit citizens' ability to obtain redress through these institutions.    If aggrieved Chinese citizens are choosing to opt out of these institutions in favor of large scale mass petitions or riots as a means of resolving their problems, this has significant implications for China's social stability.