Mass Digitization of Chinese Court Decisions: How to Use Text as Data in the Field of Chinese Law

Abstract

Over the past five years, Chinese courts have placed tens of millions of court judgments online. We analyze the promise and pitfalls of using this remarkable new data source, highlighting the takeaways for readers who face similar issues using other collections of legal texts. Drawing on a dataset of 1,058,986 documents from Henan province, we first document problems with missing data and call on scholars to treat variation in court disclosure rates as an urgent research question. We then outline strategies to learn from a corpus that is vast and incomplete. Using a topic model of administrative litigation in Henan, we complicate the conventional wisdom that administrative lawsuits are an extension of contentious politics that give Chinese citizens an opportunity to challenge the state. Instead, we find a high prevalence of administrative cases that reflect an underlying dispute between two private parties, suggesting that administrative lawsuits often represent an attempt to enlist help from the state resolving a civil dispute.

Body Count Politics: Quantification, Secrecy, and Capital Punishment in China

“…How much selectivity is taking place? In their analysis of court documents for Henan province, one group of researchers estimates that about 41 percent of Henan provincial cases appear online, a figure that lines up with other national estimates (Liebman et al 2019, 13). These researchers were able to assess the extent of missing data for the year 2014 by comparing the total number of cases collected online for that year with an internal statistic of total cases in 2014 obtained from a contact in the court (13).…”

“…Access to court documents has historically been limited in China. This was not only the case for overtly sensitive cases such as those involving the death penalty but also for the millions of more mundane civil and criminal cases that take place in China every year (Heilmann 2017, 141–42; Liebman et al 2019, 5–6). Early in the twenty-first century, advocates encouraged transparency initiatives as a tool to fight corruption (Liebman et al 2019, 7).…”

“…This was not only the case for overtly sensitive cases such as those involving the death penalty but also for the millions of more mundane civil and criminal cases that take place in China every year (Heilmann 2017, 141–42; Liebman et al 2019, 5–6). Early in the twenty-first century, advocates encouraged transparency initiatives as a tool to fight corruption (Liebman et al 2019, 7). Provincial courts began experimenting with the publication of court records, and the SPC eventually built on those initiatives to create a comprehensive national project (7).…”

“…The documents themselves are also conspicuously lacking in classificatory information. Published cases typically include case numbers that may be used to help identify gaps in a published docket, but the SPC death penalty review documents do not (Liebman et al 2019, 12).…”

Decoupling: Marital Violence and the Struggle to Divorce in China

“…As part of broader government transparency initiatives, selected Chinese courts began publishing their decisions on public websites on a trial basis in the early 2000s, but in significant numbers beginning only in 2008 (Tang and Liu 2019;Ma, Yu, and He 2016). Prior to the promulgation of SPC rules in 2013 requiring all courts to publish (almost) all their decisions on the SPC's newly launched website, China Judgments Online (located at http:// wenshu.court.gov.cn/), provincial high courts regulated the online posting of decisions on their own websites under the guidance of the SPC (Hou and Keith 2012;Liebman et al 2017;Ahl and Sprick 2018). Some high courts, including those in Henan and Zhejiang, maintained their online repositories of court decisions even after the SPC mandated the transition to its centralized website.…”