Book Review: The Construction of Guilt: An Empirical Account of Routine Chinese Injustice
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663920973378 |
| Published date | 01 June 2021 |
| Author | Sida Liu |
| Date | 01 June 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
ORCID iD
Ciara Fitzpatrick https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4606-9930
References
Foucault M (1977) Discipline and Punish. New York: Pantheon Books.
YU MOU, The Construction of Guilt: An Empirical Account of Routine Chinese Injustice.
Oxford: Hart, 2020, pp. 264, ISBN 978-1-50991-302-2.
Criminal justice is perhaps the most extensively researched area of sociolegal studies on
China, yet it remains a large black box. Most existing studies focus on the more visible
parts of China’s opaque criminal justice system, such as criminal trials, defence lawyers,
or street-level policing. The procuratorate, one of the three pillars of the ‘iron triangle’ of
Chinese criminal justice (together with the police and the court), is almost out of sight for
sociolegal researchers due to the difficulty of access.
Yu Mou’s ground-breaking book The Construction of Guilt in China sheds light on an
obscure and dark side of Chinese criminal justice, or what she calls ‘routine Chinese
injustice’. Her focus is not on any high-profile law practitioner or cause c´
ele
`bre, but on
the most mundane everyday practices of police officers and procurators that subvert law
and justice. By tracing the social construction of the criminal case dossier from police
investigation to prosecution review and then to trial by a variety of legal actors, Mou’s
book presents by far the most vivid and in-depth depiction of how injustice occurs on a
regular basis in China’s criminal justice system. The book makes no grand theoretical
argument, nor does it contain any sensational case narrative, yet it presents extraordi-
narily rich and powerful empirical materials from the author’s interviews, participant
observation, and archival research.
The book begins with a discussion of the meanings of justice, injustice, and truth in
the Chinese context. Mou first presents a number of high-profile wrongful convictions
and then argues that low-profile cases of routine injustice deserve more attention because
‘the accused people in these cases have experienced a kind of injustice that has been so
deeply ingrained and integrated into the system’ (p. 11). Such injustice is often invisible
from the public view as it is ‘a normalised miscarriage of justice’ (p. 12) embedded in the
criminal process itself. Truth in Chinese criminal justice is considered an ‘objective
truth’, yet it ‘is often involved with legal actors engaging with and manipulating rules’
(p. 18). At the centre of this social construction of justice and truth is the case dossier, a
material product of routine, bureaucratic policing, prosecutorial, and judicial work. As
Mou demonstrates with numerous examples throughout the book, routine Chinese injus-
tice occurs precisely in the social production of the case dossier.
Getting access to criminal case dossiers is a challenging task in China. While many
judicial decisions are made available online in recent years, the full case dossier is rarely
exposed to the public. Mou adopted the classic sociolegal approach of participant
492 Social & Legal Studies 30(3)
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