Book Review: Dispute Resolution in China: Litigation, Arbitration, Mediation, and their Interactions
| Author | Sida Liu |
| Published date | 01 October 2022 |
| Date | 01 October 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/09646639221088529 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews
WEIXIA GU, Dispute Resolution in China: Litigation, Arbitration, Mediation, and their Interactions.
London/New York: Routledge, 2021, 288pp, ISBN 978-1-138-82359-4, $150 USD Hardcover.
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 pano-
ramic narrative and critical examination of China’s civil and commercial dispute reso-
lution 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, commer-
cial 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 hetero-
geneous 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
Social & Legal Studies
2022, Vol. 31(5) 796–803
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/09646639221088529
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