744545

research-article2017
CIN0010.1177/0920203X17744545China InformationWei Lit

Article china

INFORMATION
Disembedding lawful activism
in contemporary China:
The confrontational politics
China Information
of a green NGO’s legal 2018, Vol. 32(2) 224­–243
© The Author(s) 2017
mobilization Reprints and permissions:
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DOI: 10.1177/0920203X17744545
https://doi.org/10.1177/0920203X17744545
journals.sagepub.com/home/cin

Yew Wei Lit

City University of Hong Kong, China

Abstract
Recent legal reforms in China, particularly amendments in 2014 to the Environmental
Protection Law, have encouraged environmental non-governmental organizations
(ENGOs) to embrace legal strategies in their advocacy. However, the wider significance
of such strategies remains understudied and underestimated. This article examines one
such example in Xiamen, Fujian Province, where an ENGO, incensed by the conversion
of walkways into parking spaces, led the first administrative lawsuit in the name of
‘pedestrians’ rights’ (行人路权) in China in early 2015. Based on digital ethnography and
participant observation, the case illustrates three salient points: first, legal mobilization
is conflict-laden and confrontational; second, depoliticized legal actions belie the
development of popular critical consciousness; and third, professional ties have become
more instrumental than connections with state officials. The net result is then an
embedded activism that evinces disembedding tensions. This questions conventional
expectations over Chinese environmental activism, that it is non-confrontational and
overdependent on personal relations with local officials. In addition to elucidating the
disembedding processes and experiences absent in previous ENGO literature, this
exploratory research offers a snapshot of lawful activism among environmentalists,
illustrating the wider opportunities and challenges accompanying ‘the turn to law’.

Keywords
environmental NGOs (ENGOs), legal campaign, administrative litigation, social
resistance, rule of law

Corresponding author:
Yew Wei Lit, Department of Asian and International Studies, City University of Hong Kong, 83 Tat Chee
Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China.
Email: weilit.yew@cityu.edu.hk
Yew 225

Environmental activism in China is usually non-confrontational, because environmental-

ists tend to work through their personal and institutionalized relations with the state.1
However, since the amendment of the Environmental Protection Law, nine environmen-
tal non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) have launched 37 public interest lawsuits
against polluting firms in 2015, litigating over problems of water, air, and soil pollution.2
Similarly, Xiamen Green Volunteers (hereafter Xiamen Volunteers),3 a Xiamen-based
ENGO in Fujian, led an administrative suit against local state actors over ‘pedestrians’
rights’ (行人路权) in 2015, the first of its kind in China. This calls for recalibrating con-
ventional depictions about ENGOs’ supposedly ‘routine’ and ‘non-confrontational’
activism,4 in order to capture their evolving action repertoire that has begun incorporat-
ing lawful confrontation. To this end, this exploratory research on Xiamen Volunteers’
legal campaign addresses its underlying strategic interactions, showing how environ-
mentalists redefine what is considered confrontational, adjust their modus operandi, and
position themselves vis-a-vis China’s rule-of-law regime. In short, it offers an illustrative
snapshot of ‘lawful activism’ within environmental advocacy, referring specifically to
advocacy strategies that are couched in the language of rule of law, and seek to attain and
publicize environmental data, and/or press for remedial action, through existing courts,
laws, and legal procedures.
The law in China has largely been painted as a contested terrain exclusive to conflicts
in property and labour relations.5 Where litigation is acknowledged as an ENGO tactic in
China, researchers usually cite only the example of the Centre for Legal Assistance to
Pollution Victims (污染受害者法律帮助中心, hereafter Legal Assistance Centre)
whose staff includes environmental lawyers and legal academics. Xiamen Volunteers’
court experience provides a unique window into societal responses to China’s rule-of-
law regime among a non-lawyer group that was previously unfamiliar with legal chan-
nels. Like the labour dispute plaintiffs Mary Gallagher surveyed, Xiamen Volunteers saw
the law as ‘something to be learned and … gamed’. Yet, they also experienced ‘informed
disenchantment’, acquiring ‘legal consciousness in terms of knowledge about the law
and feelings of greater efficacy and understanding of legal strategy with a concomitant
sense of disappointment and frustration about inequities and dysfunctional aspects of
China’s developing legal system’.6 But unlike these usually unorganized social actors
who seek to maximize their individual interests, environmentalists enjoy advantageous
social positions and are armed with experienced leadership, vital resources and social
capital that facilitate the execution of ambitious agendas. The ENGO campaign pre-
sented here was both reactive and proactive; it resisted ‘new disadvantages’ hampering
pedestrians’ mobility,7 while seeking in the long run the recognition of pedestrians’ rights
that remain unprotected under Chinese law. The legal arena, in the hands of these activ-
ists, then potentially becomes more than a means for conflict resolution, but also an
indirect avenue for advancing policy change.
In what follows, I first argue why and how this emerging legal advocacy produces
empirical tensions with the concept of embedded activism that commonly describes the
nature of Chinese ENGOs. I then elaborate on the political and associational dynamics
framing the rise of lawful activism. This helps bridge the law and society literature with
Chinese ENGO studies that have progressed separately.8 Before detailing Xiamen
Volunteers’ lawful activism, I briefly discuss the background surrounding the issue of
226 China Information 32(2)

pedestrians’ rights. Next, I review how legal resistance shifted the way Xiamen Volunteers
viewed its relationship with the state: the experience of state-imposed constraints, the
growth of critical consciousness, and the closer link-up with professionals contributed to
a disembedding effect. Finally, I close with comments on the significance of the case
study and areas for additional research.
Data collection was conducted through a three-month participant observation in
Xiamen between April and June 2015 when I was a volunteer and observer for the legal
campaign. Through access to Xiamen Volunteers, I was able to review court documents,
meeting minutes, and a variety of ENGO publications. Aside from taking notes on all
campaign meetings and court trips I attended, I subscribed to the WeChat (微信) group
that kept people abreast of the campaign developments.9 Access to this group allowed
continued observation offsite and online of a year’s worth of internal discussions from
May 2015 to May 2016, capturing the duration of the legal process that concluded with
an appeal hearing in April 2016.10 Observations at both digital and physical sites of inter-
actions present an illustrative account of the legal discourse and praxis of an ENGO. To
minimize researcher bias, I analysed subject interactions I neither led nor elicited. Semi-
structured interviews with academics, ENGO leaders and staff in Beijing and Sichuan
Province between August and October 2015 also provided suggestive variation in per-
spectives on the use of law in their advocacy.11
Findings from this single case study should not be interpreted as definitive or repre-
sentative of all ENGOs. Rather, by elucidating the disembedding processes and experi-
ences absent from the embedded activism literature, they help illuminate the
‘micro-foundations of an active society’.12 Additionally, they offer an up-close glimpse
into the wider opportunities and challenges accompanying ‘the turn to law’ among
environmentalists.

Beyond embeddedness?
Studies on Chinese ENGOs tend to focus on the issue of associational autonomy, under-
standably given China’s authoritarian milieu.13 In this tradition, Peter Ho and Richard
Louis Edmonds describe Chinese environmental activism as ‘embedded’, distinguishing
it from its radical counterparts elsewhere. Enabled by formal and informal ties to state
officials, environmentalists deploy non-confrontational strategies that portray them-
selves as partners with the state. Put differently, ENGOs prefer undertaking depoliticized
action, and forging instrumental ties with state authorities, which is a survival strategy
that bestows legitimacy on them.14 However, these observations are derived mostly from
analyses of early ENGOs and their first-generation leaders, who invariably were part of
the state system. The classic example is the founder of Friends of Nature, Liang Congjie,
who was a member of the national Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.
More importantly, scholars downplay ‘the disembedding [tensions]’ resulting from legal
mobilization and recent legal reforms.15
Insofar as ENGOs partake in embedded activism, litigating against local state agents
is likely considered non-confrontational, because embedded activism operates on a max-
imal definition of confrontational, that is ‘confrontations with the national govern-
ment’.16 Small wonder then, collective petitioning and direct action targeting the local
Yew 227

government has not been viewed as confrontational under this embedded framework.17
This borders on tautology, because in the face of salient threats of state repression, no
ENGO would contemplate portraying itself as ‘against the national state’. Rather, suing
the local state can be institutionalized but confrontational and transgressive. As one legal
scholar remarks, the confrontational nature crystallizes when a lawsuit enrages state offi-
cials, and they might fume, ‘You [dare to] sue me?’18
Even though Xiamen Volunteers steadfastly rejected mass protest as a mode of mobili-
zation, their legal strategy evinces qualities of resistance that are obscured when focusing
simply on embeddedness. Legal action, as Guobin Yang comments, is ‘politics by other
means … that thrives on political ambiguities’, approximating a ‘boundary-spanning’
resistance that straddles the bounds separating institutionalized and non-institutionalized
politics.19 These campaigners’ behaviour thus finds affinity with rightful resisters studied
elsewhere, as they invoke legality and display sophisticated rights consciousness.20
Congruent with insights from law and society literature that legal mobilization is a bottom–up
resistance against state hegemony,21 litigants resist state-imposed hurdles both overtly and
symbolically, undergoing continual learning and adaptation to outwit and outplay the local
state. However, instead of appealing to upper-level officials and central rhetoric as rightful
resisters do, they appealed to broader principles, real and imagined, underpinning the rule-
of-law complex, as they fought for a new issue that had no domestic precedents, uniform
benchmarks, or central edict.
While maintaining relations with state officials is paramount, that legal mobilization
still takes place as political space shrinks in China shows that embeddedness need not be
the default coping strategy of ENGOs. Moreover, the premise of litigation is antithetical
to embeddedness, because principles of universalism and equality before the law under-
pin the legal system, foreclosing actions depending on particularistic ties with state offi-
cials.22 A study on Chinese women’s rights litigants notes that legal action pits the
‘divisive assertion of rights’ against the imperative of preserving relationships.23 Hence,
even as legal mobilization is contained within institutionalized politics, its inherent
transgression points to a disembedding pull away from embedded activism.

Lawful activism
Stimulated by the central state’s increased emphasis on environmentalism, especially in
the aftermath of several environmental disasters in the 1980s and 1990s,24 the production
and circulation of environmental discourses – or ‘greenspeak’ – by ENGOs and the
media have encouraged an emerging ‘green public sphere’.25 The ‘greening’ of state and
society has thus enabled a vibrant environmental activism in China. But less emphasized
is the parallel discursive proliferation of ‘lawspeak’ around environmentalism since the
eve of the 21st century. Under state programmes of ‘legalization’ (法制化) to facilitate
China’s market transition,26 environmental legalization enshrined through legislations
between 2003 and 2008 public participation in environmental concerns, explicitly map-
ping lawspeak on to greenspeak.27 The Hu Jintao administration had backed local legal
innovation such as the establishment of environmental courts, to which ENGOs
responded with their first public interest lawsuit in Qujing, Yunnan Province, in 2011.
However, the law experienced in practice falls short of the law written in the books.
228 China Information 32(2)

While the Qujing lawsuit was unresolved,28 the environmental courts were ‘preoccupied
with prosecuting small-time rule-breakers, rather than tackling pollution’.29
Under Xi Jinping, while party control of the judiciary has centralized and tolerance of
public-interest lawyer activities has declined further, the central government appears
committed to deeper legal reforms. The Fourth Plenum of the Chinese Communist Party
Central Committee in October 2014 addressed the theme of rule of law – a milestone
whose significance Randall Peerenboom likens to Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour for
economic reforms.30 In 2014, both the Administrative Procedure Law and Environmental
Protection Law were amended for the first time since 1989. When the central govern-
ment signalled its readiness to instrumentalize law as a tool to punish state officials and
resolve citizen disputes, it marked a reversal of the ‘turn against law’.31 Though Xi’s
intentions had less to do with delivering citizen justice than disciplining local state
agents, environmentalists saw common ground in holding local authorities accountable
for the environmental mismanagement the latter have been complicit in.
Despite local governments’ resistance, the central leadership’s renewed emphasis on
environmental protection ensured that revisions to the Environmental Protection Law
were passed.32 Effective from 2015, the amendments include a new chapter devoted to
‘information disclosure and public participation’ (信息公开和公众参与), which is key
to the public’s role of environmental monitoring. The amendments recognize certain
ENGOs for bringing public interest lawsuits on behalf of environmentally aggrieved citi-
zens on condition that they must be registered with a civil affairs authority at or above
the city level, and involved in public interest environmental advocacy continuously for
five years without having broken any law.33 Just as Chinese trade unions ‘turned work-
ers’ individual legal mobilization into a form of union action that represents its constitu-
ency’, environmentalists now have an opportunity to deliver a similar agenda through
litigating on behalf of pollution victims.34 Friends of Nature, China’s oldest ENGO and
an archetype of embedded activism, had taken on six such lawsuits by 29 October 2015,
winning the first of them in Nanping, Fujian Province.35 The new law, combined with the
dissemination of the state’s campaign-like rhetoric about using the ‘law as a weapon’ in
environmental protection matters,36 emitted credible signals about the permissiveness of
legal recourse. Due to fears of state repression, ENGOs usually refrain from organizing
environmental resistance. But by legally taking on a depoliticized matter, they can
assume a leadership role under the shelter of rule of law without risking state censure,
even if this means potentially putting the local state in a bad light. An ENGO thus called
the law a ‘new opportunity’ to apply legal perspectives in its current work.37
Amidst the flurry of legislation, ENGOs have been undergoing years of legal experi-
ence-sharing and advocacy training, where invited lawyers or legal scholars educate
them on relevant legislation through well-circulated handbooks and pamphlets. For
instance, in anticipation of the implementation of the 2008 Disclosure of Environmental
Information Measures, the Legal Assistance Centre prepared a manual and held a work-
shop attended by ENGO representatives from all over China. Previously, at a Legal
Assistance Centre seminar in April 2007, participants signed a proposal entitled ‘We
believe in the law’, declaring their commitment to utilizing legal means for environmen-
tal protection endeavours.38 ENGOs had realized the need for more assertive actions and
that they could not rely solely on publicity and awareness campaigns.39
Yew 229

Recent ENGO publications have elucidated best practices in legal advocacy and suc-
cessful case studies for emulation.40 Despite countless stories on the limits of legal
action, the few successful instances were sufficient to inspire confidence in its possibility
as a potent weapon. As Michael McCann remarks, small advances are good enough for
movements to build on for further legal mobilization.41 Lawful activism then builds on
the accumulation of small advances in legal recognition of public participation in envi-
ronmental affairs over the years. The production and distribution of lawspeak, as well as
its actualization and perceived returns, have prepared ENGOs to embrace legal strategies
as part of their action repertoire. Besides lawsuits initiated by ENGOs such as Legal
Assistance Centre and Friends of Nature, legal measures are already part of the modus
operandi of many. To build a database on waste incinerators in China, Wuhu Ecology
Centre collected information from environmental protection bureaus through the
Environmental Information Disclosure Measures. The Chongqing Green Volunteer
League applied for administrative review over the Jinsha hydroelectric dam project
under the Administrative Reconsideration Law.42 Xiamen Volunteers’ legal campaign not
only extended these trends, but also gave them feedback. Even as the campaign was
progressing in 2015, Xiamen Volunteers joined ENGO conferences in Chongqing,
Chengdu, and Guangzhou to share its court experience.

Green commuting activism

Existing traffic infrastructure in Chinese cities has not kept up with the rapid pace of
urbanization. Massive population growth has precipitated a rise in private ownership of
motorized vehicles – seen as a necessity and status symbol. In Xiamen, motorized vehi-
cle ownership reached about 1.035 million in 2013, a 13.38 per cent surge from the pre-
vious year. Car ownership in every hundred households steadily rose from 23 in 2010 to
30 in 2011, and to 33 by the end of 2012. Though lagging behind Beijing’s car owner-
ship, which exceeded 33 in every hundred by the end of 2010, it surpassed that of
Guangzhou, a far larger city, which recorded 21 in 2010, 26 in 2011, and 32 in 2012.
Current traffic designs invariably prioritize car owners, often at the expense of non-
motorists – the natural constituents of ENGOs propagating low-carbon travel. Indeed,
according to a 2012 survey conducted by Xiamen’s Bureau of Statistics, 84.6 per cent of
the respondents believed that the expanding number of motorized vehicles contributed to
Xiamen’s worsening traffic situation, and 32.5 per cent attributed the problem to ‘unrea-
sonable traffic planning’.43
Recently, ENGOs, such as Bike Guangzhou and Beijing-based Nature University,
have been campaigning to make cycling safer and more feasible. They have called for
city planning to accommodate cyclists’ interests, and stronger legal enforcement to stop
motorized vehicles from obstructing bicycle lanes. This is consistent with their work on
the development of sustainable transport to achieve the long-term goal of carbon emis-
sions reduction. Xiamen Volunteers has likewise been part of the Green Commuting
Network, an alliance of over 20 ENGOs seeking to spread the idea of ‘green commuting’
nationwide. Safeguarding pedestrians’ rights is then a natural progression from these past
efforts, rather than an entirely new issue frontier for environmentalists. With greater
awareness of how urban mobility is better handled outside of China, grievances over
230 China Information 32(2)

commuting have found expressions in the language of ‘rights’, which would frame the
wider debates and struggles against unjust traffic policies.

Xiamen Volunteers’ legal mobilization

Founded in 1999 and registered with the civil affairs bureau in 2007, Xiamen Volunteers
was one of Xiamen’s earliest ENGOs. Consisting of three permanent staff members and
three interns, it has engaged in issues from waste sorting and recycling to monitoring the
water quality of a nearby river. It has also received recognition from the Ministry of
Environmental Protection and the Fujian provincial media over the years. Fei, its founder
and leader, had a corporate background and previously worked as a part-time university
lecturer. Like many Chinese ENGOs that distance themselves from mass environmental
uprisings, Xiamen Volunteers notably did not mobilize in the 2007 protest against a petro-
chemical factory in Xiamen. In the previous decade of green commuting activism,
Xiamen Volunteers had held public awareness activities and meetings with government
officials to influence policymaking. Feeling that these efforts had ‘little effect’, 2015
marked a shift in strategy to effect change.44
The pedestrian sidewalk Fei must pass across to go to work from home was re-
designed and doubled up as parking spaces for motorists in 2012. As the sidewalk became
too narrow for pedestrians, Fei had to walk on the road, subjecting herself to unaccepta-
ble traffic risks. In April 2015, she sued the street-level office and demanded reversal of
this policy, contending that she had been deprived of her right to use the walkway. What
seemed like an individualized action was actually a part of Xiamen Volunteers’ campaign
to ‘Defend Pedestrians’ Rights’ (维护行人路权).
The citywide phenomenon of cars parking on sidewalks first drew Fei’s attention in
February 2015. Before going ahead with the campaign, Fei consulted and was encour-
aged by a renowned Beijing-based environmentalist, who believed in trying out new
means of activism.45 Xiamen Volunteers recruited volunteers, whose professional back-
grounds included education, urban planning, the media and the legal sector, from among
its long-time supporters and the public at large. While the campaign was largely driven
by Fei with the assistance from Xiamen Volunteers’ staff and interns, it attracted inter-
ested citizens beyond Xiamen to its WeChat group.46 Attended by usually no more than
10 persons, the campaign meetings were lively occasions involving reflective discus-
sions about publicity strategies, funding, and the state of pedestrians’ protection beyond
Xiamen and China. To construct the legal case, volunteers individually requested infor-
mation from state agencies on the government unit responsible for collecting parking
charges and marking the parking spaces through the Regulation on the Disclosure of
Government Information.
The campaign, through Fei, filed two separate lawsuits in April, nicknamed respec-
tively ‘spear’ (矛) and ‘shield’ (盾). Whereas the shield challenged the decision of turn-
ing sidewalks into parking spaces, the spear disputed Fei’s RMB 100 fine for temporarily
parking her car at a roadside in February. Enclosed on three sides by walkways that cre-
ated a bay-shaped appearance (see Figure 1), this roadside had no yellow line or signs
prohibiting parking. Suspecting this had been an entrapment zone, she sued the local
traffic police, to at least clarify whether the bay was part of the carriageway or
Yew 231

Figure 1.  Parking bay on what was previously a sidewalk (left), before being redesigned post-
trial to block parking (right).
Source: Courtesy of a Xiamen ENGO member; reproduced with permission.

the walkway. If she were to lose this suit on the grounds it was a walkway, Fei and her
lawyers calculated it would aid her defence for the shield lawsuit by throwing doubt on
the legality of parking on sidewalks altogether. Therefore, she intended to ‘take the state
at its word’,47 forcing the state to contradict itself.48
Fei found pro bono lawyers for both cases. Because the Xiamen lawyer for the shield
lawsuit could not handle another case, Fei mobilized her personal networks all the way
to Beijing, securing the services of a Guangdong-based lawyer. To absorb the lawyer’s
travelling and accommodation expenses, in addition to a nominal fee of RMB 3000,
Xiamen Volunteers initiated a crowd-funding plea on WeChat, which volunteers for-
warded to their own social networks. Setting RMB 10,000 as the target, nearly RMB
5300 poured in from 230 people after a month.49
The suits were successfully filed at the administrative adjudication chambers (‘the
court’). However, the adjudication chambers saw the defendants’ pre-trial written
response as a list of ‘specious arguments’. The shield defendants stated that they were
wrongfully sued, since the traffic police demarcated the parking lots (even though, as the
plaintiff contended, it required the street office’s cooperation). Other than claiming that
the statute of limitations had expired,50 the defendants argued that Fei could not prove the
harm she experienced, or her regular use of the sidewalk. By contrast, the spear plaintiff
apparently ‘did not even bother to argue’ in court in June 2015.51 Besides prevaricating
over the designation of the contested road before confirming it as a carriageway, the
defendants claimed the act of leaving the car at the roadside was illegal, with or without
a yellow line.52
Apart from inviting reporters to the hearings, Xiamen Volunteers urged the public
through social media to also attend to ‘push for justice’. As Fei rationalized later, ‘Judges
would be less inclined to act according to their whims, if the audience was large enough.’ 53
232 China Information 32(2)

The shield hearing in May 2015 drew 15 people.54 From my observations, other than two
reporters, most attendees were part of the campaign or its WeChat group. At least two
were unaffiliated with the campaign and turned up out of interest after finding out about
the case through social media.
The judges ruled against Fei in the spear lawsuit, interpreting the police action as
‘flawed’, rather than ‘illegal’, and declaring it was a ‘bay-style road section’ of the car-
riageway.55 At the September 2015 appeal hearing, the defendants reverted to calling it a
walkway, because it was a non-motorized pathway bridging the existing sidewalks.56 Fei
lost her appeal.
Meanwhile, after much deliberation over the shield, the judges asked Fei to switch the
defendant to the traffic police instead, allowing for a retrial. Fei and her lawyer insisted
on suing both the street office and the traffic police, until the judge threatened to throw
out the suit altogether.57 They lost the retrial in November 2015, and the appeal hearing
in April 2016. The appeals court decided Fei was unqualified to bring suit, because she
could not show her ‘property ownership certificate’ over the disputed sidewalk.

Insights from Xiamen Volunteers’ campaign

In a city with a population of 3.73 million, the amount of donation, the number of donors,
and the size of court audience throughout this campaign indicated that it had not ade-
quately aroused interest from the broader citizenry. This is partly because Xiamen
Volunteers’ finite resources had been devoted to legal action, even though public out-
reach was on its agenda. Nonetheless, the campaigners were somewhat encouraged by a
redesign of the ‘bay-style’ roadside that happened a week after the appeal trial. Road
poles were installed to block vehicle parking, hence eliminating the practice of entrap-
ment (see Figure 1). The unusual timing led them to conclude that it was due to pressure
from their legal action.
To demonstrate how this lawful turn marks a disjuncture with embedded activism, in
the following I examine three key aspects: conflictual elements; critical consciousness
developing underneath the depoliticized action; and social ties built away from the state.

Conflict-laden process
While the Administrative Litigation Law grants citizens a route to dispute state deci-
sions, its goal is more to check against cadre misconduct and push state agencies into
compliance with the law than protecting citizens’ negative freedoms.58 Unlike civil liti-
gation that allows for mediation, administrative litigation generally designates winners
and losers, giving rise to a high-stake zero-sum game.59 Besides a possible polarizing
outcome, plaintiffs confront not only specious substantive arguments, but also con-
straints throughout the legal course.
The defence rhetoric and court rulings had outraged the campaigners’ sense of justice.
Though they had little illusion about the court’s partiality from the beginning, they were
not acquainted with the extent of its partiality until experiencing it themselves. Through
colourful and provocative use of words, Xiamen Volunteers deftly reported on it via
social media. For instance, one summary of the spear court decision was entitled, ‘What
Yew 233

happened to the promised fairness and justice?’60 These reports contrasted the defend-
ants’ seemingly unreasonable arguments with the plaintiff’s well-reasoned points, ques-
tioning out loud these officials’ commitment to serving the people and justice.
Consequently, awarding victory to the defendants was framed as a sign of the court col-
luding with them.
To limit the publicity of the hearings – and the possible blowback to the state – judi-
cial officials had deployed subtle suppressive tactics.61 They banned journalists from
attending and covering the shield hearing. Attendees who were scribbling notes during
the proceeding were asked whether they were reporters. One reporter was discovered and
reprimanded after the trial concluded. After the hearing made it to the press, the judge
told Fei that it was wrong to mobilize media attention because it would affect the judicial
process, questioning her motives and indirectly threatening her. At the spear hearing,
court officials photocopied attendees’ identity cards and requested their employers’
information. Since everyone already had to go through routine identity checks at the
entrance, this was seen as intimidation.62 These state-imposed constraints only reinforced
their sense of injustice.
Hence, litigation turned the campaigners and local state agencies into legal adversar-
ies, with the former resisting legal arguments and extra-legal tactics from the latter. The
confrontation is also manifested symbolically and physically. The imagery of ‘citizens
suing officials’ (民告官) underlying administrative litigation already pits society against
the state. Its physical manifestation in the courtroom, with the plaintiffs on the left facing
directly the defendants on the right, signifies this confrontational nature.63

Thriving critical consciousness

Despite everyday experiences of bad policies and administrative abuses, many ordinary
Chinese balk at the costly option of legal redress.64 One audience member from the
shield hearing explained that most people either know little of legal channels or have no
confidence in their individual efficacy.65 Notwithstanding the numerous instances of
frustration and indignation, navigating the legal process could be energizing and
empowering, as the campaigners aimed to ‘make [state officials] suffer’ for flouting the
rules.66 They relished the opportunity of giving the authorities a hard time, frequently
using the phrase ‘very fun’ throughout their discussions. This social-psychological pay-
off is akin to that of participants of ‘consentful contention’, as they ‘hav[e] fun at the
authorities’ expense’ and attain a ‘sense of agency … that might arise from even modest
degrees of success’.67
Direct contact with the state strengthened the campaigners’ critical consciousness. At a
campaign meeting, Fei shared her recent experience of calling ‘110’, the police hotline to
complain about illegal parking on the sidewalks. Having waited for an hour with no police
appearing, she called back, only to get rude treatment from the officer on the line. Fei then
complained about him, which resulted in a personal apology to her days later. When she
phoned again for a different complaint, the police arrived at the scene within five minutes.
Fei ended the account with a lesson to all in attendance: ‘call “110” next time; you need
to try it out to know [its effect]’. This line sums up the motivations and experimental
approach of the campaigners when they invoke the law. It also demonstrates how they
234 China Information 32(2)

became ‘little experts’ who shared strategic knowledge with others about working the law,
enabling others to learn and believe in their own individual agency.68 For many, it was
their first chance to exercise agency to challenge the local state’s infallibility, just as it was
Fei’s first time stepping into a courtroom.
Immediately after the shield hearing, listeners spontaneously gathered and burst into
audible discussions inside the courtroom. They spoke of their rights as a ‘subject to be
served’, pointedly criticizing the incompetency of the street office and the weaknesses in
local traffic planning. The legal process thus offered a window into an open and civil
clash between state and society, where one could indulge in talks of citizenship and
rights. As discussions involving Fei reveal, she hoped others would similarly mobilize
the law to press the government to ‘rule according to law’ (依法治国), which ultimately
means ‘checking state power through the cage of the legal system’. Even if she were to
lose her suits, she believed government officials would be less likely to persist in their
old ways.69 This echoes other environmentalists’ aspirations of serving the environmen-
tal monitoring role through promoting public participation.70
Similar to the workshops and seminars assembling like-minded environmentalists,
the legal campaign formed a site for ‘self-transformation and identity production’,71
facilitating the creation of a pedestrians’ rights collective action frame that ‘organize[d]
experience and guide[d] action’.72 Injustice, agency and identity are key components to
such a collective action frame. While conflict with state agents fuels a ‘shared moral
indignation’, the agency component kicks in by telling people that ‘something can be
done’ about this injustice, and ‘that “we” can do something’. But to construct this iden-
tity of ‘we’, it is set against ‘some “they” who have different interests or values’.73 Put
simply, campaigners derived agency from being against the local state that had unmis-
takably different interests and values, as they established an oppositional collective iden-
tity of citizens, which entailed consciousness of given rights and that of means of agency
to satisfy those rights. Their attitude and behaviour underline the disembedding contra-
dictions within their activism: they work within the state, if uneasily, by paradoxically
working against the state.

Professional ties
Legal mobilization is a knowledge-intensive collaborative process, and because of the
uncertainty surrounding court processes, legal strategy can determine the case outcome.74
Therefore, it requires expertise not only in the law, but also in the issue domain itself.
Xiamen Volunteers brought on several lawyers to its WeChat group. When Fei and her col-
leagues were confused about legal procedures or the propriety of certain court action, these
lawyers provided guidance and assurances, even urging patience when the court had not
promptly responded. For instance, the court rang up one volunteer who had filed her own
suit for a meet-up. Suspecting it was an attempt to persuade her to drop the suit, one lawyer
told her to ignore it because it was not standard legal procedure.75 Similarly, one volunteer
who was affiliated with the local urban planning and design institute assisted when the
lawyer needed information on the optimal width of parking spaces and walkways.
Furthermore, Fei viewed the media as capable of shaping public opinion, which in turn
could pressure the government. Hence, she appealed often to her personal network of
Yew 235

reporters to cover the hearings. As she told me, ‘[the legal battle] will make a difference,
only if there is pressure from public opinion and the media follows up’.76 Moreover, the
crowd-funding method forced the campaigners to mobilize their own social networks for
donation. When they were uncertain about how to publicize the hearings or raise funds
through social media, fellow environmentalists provided prompt encouragement and
suggestions.
Because finding a public-interest lawyer or an urban planning expert is not easy, net-
working and relationship-building with these professionals are required, shifting the
direction of embeddedness towards them and slightly away from the state. Though this
is not mutually exclusive with embedded ties with the state, legal mobilization decreases
the salience of such ties, paving the way for a less embedded activism. For example,
rather than relying on government insiders as ‘back channels’ of information for their
legal case, Xiamen Volunteers made use of the Government Information Disclosure
Regulation. ENGO staff elsewhere have also revealed that the legal opening for public
interest litigation has encouraged a rudimentary formation of professional networks
between ENGOs and local law firms. Since legal expertise on environmental issues is
concentrated in the coastal region, one Sichuan-based ENGO had begun in 2014 to link
up with local lawyers and other ENGOs to build up their ‘legal capacity’.77

Conclusion
Because the law is vague on the status of public interest administrative litigation, Xiamen
Volunteers’ legal pursuit marks a first leap into relatively unknown territory that has so
far few comparable cases. However, the case reflects an emerging trend of environmen-
tal litigation where Friends of Nature had filed its first administrative lawsuit in December
2016 against the Environmental Protection Bureau of Nujiang in Yunnan Province for
approving a polluting project,78 and a Sichuan-based ENGO had assisted in a residents’
legal action over waste management.79 It is the grass-roots equivalent of ‘local experi-
ments’ with the law that have otherwise characterized China’s national policy process.80
Indeed, Friends of Nature has described its legal foray as ‘testing the law themselves’.81
While the pattern of environmental litigation appears erratic, it has corresponded closely
to central signals about utilizing the law for environmental redress. As more cases accu-
mulate, this snapshot should provide a basis for further research: for example, to what
extent does Fei’s personal history shape the legal movement and to what degree do the
experience and funding sources of the ENGOs affect their willingness to litigate?
As Sally Engle Merry argues, ‘law contains both elements of domination and the
seeds of resistance’.82 The state’s hegemonic rule-of-law rhetoric has ensured some
opening for creative experimentation among resourceful groups to challenge local state
practices during one of the most repressive periods in post-reform China. Though legal
reforms are driven by the Chinese state’s preoccupation with economic development,
social stability and regime legitimacy, their unintended consequences are far-reaching,
such that courts are emerging as institutional sites for ‘micro-assertions of rights … [that]
are distinctly different from community compromises’.83
While many ENGOs’ actions still follow the contours of embedded activism, over-
looking the transgression of specific advocacy strategy underestimates its ‘disembedding’
236 China Information 32(2)

tensions. As Ho and Edmonds suggest, it is likely that embedded activism is a ‘transient

phase’.84 If so, its successor phase may very well be, in an ENGO worker’s words, ‘envi-
ronmental protection according to law’.

Notes
I thank Deborah Davis, Kevin Miao Bo, Stephan Ortmann, Jimmy Buchanan, and the journal’s
anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts. All mistakes are my own.
  1. Peter Ho and Richard Louis Edmonds, Perspectives of time and change: Rethinking embed-
ded environmental activism in China, China Information 21(2), 2007: 331–44.
 2. 2015环境公益诉讼个案数量较新环保法实施前大幅提升 (The number of environmental
public interest lawsuits has increased since the implementation of the new Environmental
Protection Law in 2015), 18 March 2016, http://www.gdep.gov.cn/news/hbxw/201603/
t20160318_209996.html, accessed 20 January 2017.
  3. The names of persons and organizations in Xiamen are pseudonyms, because some served as
sources for my parallel research on politically sensitive protest cases.
  4. Ching Kwan Lee and You-tien Hsing, Social activism in China: Agency and possibility, in
You-tien Hsing and Ching Kwan Lee (eds) Reclaiming Chinese Society: The New Social
Activism, London and New York: Routledge, 2010, 3–4.
  5. Feng Chen, Legal mobilization by trade unions: The case of Shanghai, The China Journal
52, 2004: 27–45; Matthew S. Erie, Property rights, legal consciousness and the new media
in China: The hard case of the ‘toughest nail-house in history’, China Information 26(1),
2012: 35–59; Mary E. Gallagher, Mobilizing the law in China: ‘Informed disenchantment’
and the development of legal consciousness, Law & Society Review 40(4), 2006: 783–816;
You-tien Hsing, Urban housing mobilizations, in Hsing and Lee (eds) Reclaiming Chinese
Society, 17–41; and Ching Kwan Lee, Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt
and Sunbelt, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
  6. Gallagher, Mobilizing the law, 785–6, 810.
  7. Hanspeter Kriesi et al., New Social Movements in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995, 42.
  8. For civil environmental litigation, see Rachel E. Stern, Environmental Litigation in China: A
Study in Political Ambivalence, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
  9. WeChat is a popular mobile messaging application through which users can share images,
text, audio and video messages. It is also a social networking platform where users share pro-
files and subscribe to group messaging, and through which environmentalists connect with
like-minded people on issues of interest.
10. China researchers using digital or virtual ethnography have sourced data from mainly bul-
letin board systems, blogs, and mini-blogs. See James Leibold, Blogging alone: China, the
Internet, and the democratic illusion?, The Journal of Asian Studies 70(4), 2011: 1023–41;
Guobin Yang, The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online, New York:
Columbia University Press, 2009.
11. Themes of the interviews included their experiences and attitudes about engaging the law, and
their willingness to participate in environmental public interest litigation.
12. Lee and Hsing, Social activism in China, 2.
13. Caroline M. Cooper, ‘This is our way in’: The civil society of environmental NGOs in
south-west China, Government and Opposition 41(1), 2006: 109–36; Fengshi Wu, New part-
ners or old brothers? GONGOs in transnational environmental advocacy in China, China
Environment Series 5, 2002: 45–58.
14. Ho and Edmonds, Perspectives of time and change.
Yew 237

15. Guobin Yang, Civic environmentalism, in Hsing and Lee (eds) Reclaiming Chinese Society, 121.
16. Ho and Edmonds, Perspectives of time and change, 336, emphasis added.
17. Jiangang Zhu and Peter Ho, Not against the state, just protecting residents’ interests: An
urban movement in a Shanghai neighborhood, in Peter Ho and Richard Louis Edmonds (eds)
China’s Embedded Activism: Opportunities and Constraints of a Social Movement, London
and New York: Routledge, 2008, 151–69.
18. Interview with a legal scholar, Beijing, 9 June 2015.
19. Guobin Yang, Environmental NGOs and institutional dynamics in China, The China Quarterly
181, 2005: 55.
20. Kevin J. O’Brien and Lianjiang Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006, 63.
21. Lynette J. Chua, Pragmatic resistance, law, and social movements in authoritarian states:
The case of gay collective action in Singapore, Law & Society Review 46(4), 2012: 713–
48; Michael W. McCann, Rights at Work: Pay Equity Reform and the Politics of Legal
Mobilization, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994; and Oneida Meranto, Litigation
as rebellion, in Anne N. Costain and Andrew S. McFarland (eds) Social Movements and
American Political Institutions, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998, 216–32.
22. Mary E. Gallagher and Wang Yuhua, Users and non-users: Legal experience and its effect on
legal consciousness, in Margaret Y. K. Woo and Mary E. Gallagher (eds) Chinese Justice:
Civil Dispute Resolution in Contemporary China, New York: Cambridge University Press,
2011, 204–33.
23. Margaret Y. K. Woo, Law, development, and the rights of Chinese women: A snapshot from
the field, Columbia Journal of Asian Law 19(1), 2005: 352.
24. Elizabeth C. Economy, The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China’s
Future, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004; Peter Ho, Greening without conflict?
Environmentalism, NGOs and civil society in China, Development and Change 32(5), 2001:
893–921.
25. Guobin Yang and Craig Calhoun, Media, civil society, and the rise of a green public sphere in
China, China Information 21(2), 2007: 211–36.
26. Randall Peerenboom, China’s Long March Toward Rule of Law, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002.
27. Examples are Article 21 in the 2003 Environmental Impact Assessment Law, the 2006
Interim Measures on Public Participation in Environmental Impact, and the 2008 Measures
for the Disclosure of Environmental Information. See Thomas Johnson, Environmentalism
and NIMBYism in China: Promoting a rules-based approach to public participation,
Environmental Politics 19(3), 2010: 430–48; Allison Moore and Adria Warren, Legal advo-
cacy in environmental public participation in China: Raising the stakes and strengthening
stakeholders, China Environment Series 8, 2006: 3–23.
28. Liu Songbo 刘松柏, 环境公益诉讼前路坎坷 (A bumpy road ahead for environmental pub-
lic interest litigation), 经济日报 (Economic daily), 31 March 2015, http://paper.ce.cn/jjrb/
html/2015-03/31/content_235748.htm, accessed 9 November 2015.
29. Rachel E. Stern, The political logic of China’s new environmental courts, The China Journal
72, 2014: 54.
30. Randall Peerenboom, Fly high the banner of socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics!
What does the 4th Plenum Decision mean for legal reforms in China?, Hague Journal on the
Rule of Law 7(1), 2015: 49–74.
31. Carl Minzner, Legal reform in the Xi Jinping era, Asia Policy 20, 2015: 4–9.
32. Zhou Chen 周辰, 史上最严环保法实施: 学者还原修法博弈过程, 称最初压抑愤怒
(Implementing the strictest environmental protection law in history: Scholar recounts the
238 China Information 32(2)

struggle behind the amendments, had to suppress his anger), 澎湃 (The paper), 1 January
2015, http://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_1290473, accessed 9 November 2015.
33. 中国人民共和国环境保护法 (Environmental Protection Law of the People’s Republic of
China), 25 April 2014, http://zfs.mep.gov.cn/fl/201404/t20140425_271040.htm, accessed 13
November 2015.
34. Chen, Legal mobilization by trade unions, 29.
35. 新环保法首起环境公益诉讼案原告胜诉 (Plaintiffs won the first environmen-
tal public interest lawsuit under the new Environmental Protection Law), 自然之友
(Friends of Nature), 29 October 2015, http://www.fon.org.cn/index.php?option=com_
k2&view=item&id=11259:2017-05-12-10-22-33&Itemid=121, accessed 9 November 2015.
36. Ding Guoxiang 丁国祥, 用好法律武器, 守护碧水蓝天 (Using law as a weapon, protecting
the blue waters and sky), 中国环境监察 (China environment supervision), no. 7, 2016: 67–9.
37. 第九届岷江论坛邀请函 (Invitation to the 9th Minjiang Forum), 成都城市河流研究
会 (Chengdu Urban Rivers Association), 9 October 2015, http://www.rivers.org.cn/mjfo-
rum/201510/676.html, accessed 18 January 2017.
38. Guo Shuhua 郭淑华, 我们相信法律 – NGO以法律手段推动环境治理的实践与困境 (We
believe in the law – NGOs promote environmental governance through legal means), 绿叶
(Green leaf), no. 5, 2007: 60–1.
39. 云南铬渣案律师: 诉讼证据取决于环保局配合程度 (Yunnan chromic slag case lawyer:
Lawsuit evidence depends on environmental protection bureau), 12 November 2011, http://
news.sina.com.cn/c/sd/2011-11-12/004823453854.shtml, accessed 31 March 2016.
40. Examples are Dong Jian 董剑 (ed.), 环境保护案例解说与评析 (Protection case commentary
and analysis), Beijing: 知识产权出版社 (Intellectual property publishing house), 2015; Ma
Tiannan 马天南 (ed.), 中国环境保护倡导指南 (Manual for law-based environmental advo-
cacy in China), Beijing: 知识产权出版社 (Intellectual property publishing house), 2011.
41. McCann, Rights at Work.
42. Du Yueying 杜悦英, 金沙江环境公益维权事件追踪 (Jinsha River’s environmental public
interest advocacy), 中国经济时报 (China economic times), 27 August 2009, http://lib.cet.
com.cn/paper/szb_con/38476.html, accessed 9 November 2015.
43. Sources from Ge Xiangyong 葛向勇 (ed.), 厦门年鉴 2011–2012 (Yearbook of Xiamen 2011–
2012), Beijing: 中华书局 (Zhonghua book company), 2011–2012; Bai Yanqing 白延蜻 (ed.),
厦门年鉴 2013–2014 (Yearbook of Xiamen 2013–2014), Beijing: 中华书局 (Zhonghua
book company), 2013–2014; Duan Bingren 段柄仁 (ed.), 北京年鉴 2012 (Beijing yearbook
2012), Beijing: 北京年鉴社 (Beijing yearbook press), 2012; and Wang Linsheng 王林生
(ed.), 广州年鉴 2012–2013 (Guangzhou yearbook 2012–2013), Guangzhou: 广州年鉴社
(Guangzhou yearbook press), 2012–2013.
44. Fei’s online response on 30 December 2015. Link available upon request.
45. Informal interview with Fei, 24 June 2015.
46. As of 20 January 2017, there were 58 WeChat group members.
47. Jeremy Brooke Straughn, ‘Taking the state at its word’: The arts of consentful contention in
the German Democratic Republic, American Journal of Sociology 110(6), 2005: 1598–650.
48. Hence, it is 矛 and 盾, as 矛盾 also means ‘contradiction’ in Chinese.
49. Xiamen Volunteers WeChat report, 1 July 2015.
50. Charges must be filed within three months. The amended law has extended this to six months.
51. Fei, 24 June 2015.
52. Xiamen Volunteers WeChat report, 15 June 2015.
53. WeChat conversation, 25 September 2015.
54. Author’s headcount at the trial. Because legal proceedings always took place during working
hours on weekdays, and because the courtroom had limited seats, the audience size was small,
numbering around 15 people, and usually fewer.
Yew 239

55. Xiamen Volunteers WeChat report, 24 July 2015.

56. Xiamen Volunteers WeChat report, 28 September 2015.
57. WeChat conversations, 13 July, 18 August, and 10 November 2015. The amended law, effec-
tive from 1 May 2015, permits suing multiple agencies.
58. Pitman B. Potter, The Administrative Litigation Law of the PRC: Judicial review and bureau-
cratic reform, in Pitman B. Potter and Stanley Lubman (eds) Domestic Law Reforms in Post-
Mao China, New York: M. E Sharpe, 1994, 270–304. See also Kevin J. O’Brien and Lianjiang
Li, Suing the local state: Administrative litigation in rural China, The China Journal 51, 2004:
75–96; and Minxin Pei, Citizens v. Mandarins: Administrative litigation in China, The China
Quarterly 152, 1997: 832–62.
59. Though mediation is generally prohibited, pre-trial mediation still occurs. Michael Palmer,
Compromising courts and harmonizing ideologies: Mediation in the administrative chambers
of the people’s courts of the People’s Republic of China, in Andrew Harding and Penelope
(Pip) Nicholson (eds) New Courts in Asia, London and New York: Routledge, 2010, 251–76.
The 2014 amendments explicitly permit mediation for certain cases, for example, disputes
requiring compensation.
60. Xiamen Volunteers WeChat report, 24 July 2015.
61. Environmentalists have typically faced constraints from non-coercive bureaucratic actions.
Wei Lit Yew, Constraint without coercion: Indirect repression of environmental protest in
Malaysia, Pacific Affairs 89(3), 2016: 543–65.
62. Field observations and Fei, 24 June 2015.
63. According to Du, the ‘face-to-face placement [in Chinese court] symbolises the opposing
and competing relationship between the two sides’. This layout brings to mind that of the UK
Parliament, known for its equally adversarial debates. Biyu Du, Staging justice: Courtroom
semiotics and the judicial ideology in China, International Journal for the Semiotics of Law
– Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique 29(3), 2016: 595–614.
64. Ethan Michelson, Justice from above or below? Popular strategies for resolving grievances in
rural China, The China Quarterly 193, 2008: 43–64.
65. Personal communication, 28 May 2015.
66. WeChat conversation, 16 October 2015.
67. Consentful contention entails actors contesting a government decision ‘by performing the
role of a dutiful citizen seeking to redeem usually explicit state commitments … the … deci-
sion at issue [is] argued to contradict’. Straughn, ‘Taking the state at its word’, 1603–4, 1607,
emphasis in the original.
68. Gallagher, Mobilizing the law.
69. WeChat conversations, 9 and 25 September 2015; Fei, 30 December 2015.
70. For this comment by the head of Friends of Nature, see Sun Xiaokun 孙晓坤, 一颗踏实心,
三载执着行: 访自然之友总干事张伯驹 (A steadfast heart and strong dedication: An inter-
view with Friends of Nature chief Zhang Boju), 26 December 2016, http://www.zhhjw.org/a/
qkzz/zzml/201612/rw/2016/1226/6270.html, accessed 23 January 2017.
71. Yang, Civic environmentalism, 120.
72. David A. Snow et al., Frame alignment processes, micromobilization, and movement partici-
pation, American Sociological Review 51(4), 1986: 464.
73. William A. Gamson, Safe spaces and social movements, in Gale Miller and James A. Holstein
(eds) Perspectives on Social Problems: A Research Annual, Volume 8, Bingley, UK: Emerald
Publishing, 1996, 29.
74. For this comment by the lawyer handling the Friends of Nature Yunnan lawsuit, see Zeng
Xiangbin 曾祥斌, 公益诉讼推动环境法治 – 从云南铬渣污染引发的环境公益诉讼第一案
谈起 (Public interest litigation promotes environmental rule of law: The first environmental
240 China Information 32(2)

public interest litigation over Yunnan’s chromic slag pollution), The Aozora Foundation, 2012,
http://aozora.or.jp/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/75d47cee8e9047e548f13a5a9745041c.pdf,
accessed 31 March 2016.
75. WeChat conversations, 10 August 2015.
76. Personal communication with Fei, 12 May 2015.
77. Interview with ENGO worker, Chengdu, 14 September 2015.
78. Qie Jianrong 郄建荣, 公益诉讼: 怒江环保局被指在三江并流区违法审批 (Public inter-
est litigation: Nujiang Environmental Protection Bureau accused of illegal project approval),
法制日报 (Legal daily), 18 January 2017, http://env.people.com.cn/n1/2017/0118/c1010-
29032875.html, accessed 23 January 2017.
79. Interview with ENGO worker, 14 September 2015.
80. Sebastian Heilmann, From local experiments to national policy: The origins of China’s dis-
tinctive policy process, The China Journal 59, 2008: 1–30. For a similar observation, see
Stern, Environmental Litigation in China.
81. 环境公益诉讼简报 – 2015年2月 (Environmental public interest litigation newsletter –
February 2015), 自然之友 (Friends of Nature), 6 March 2015, http://www.fon.org.cn/index.
php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=8195:2015-2&Itemid=178, accessed 13 November
2015.
82. Sally Engle Merry, Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness Among Working-
Class Americans, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990, 8.
83. Margaret Y. K. Woo, Conclusion: Chinese justice from the bottom up, in Woo and Gallagher
(eds) Chinese Justice, 204–33.
84. Ho and Edmonds, Perspectives of time and change, 339.

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