Sarah Biddulph – författare

China’s economic reforms have brought the country both major international clout and widespread domestic prosperity. At the same time, the reforms have led to significant social upheaval, particularly manifest in labour relations. Each year, several thousand disputes break out over working conditions, many of them violent, and the Chinese state has responded with both legal and political strategies.

This book investigates how Chinese governments have used law, and other forms of regulation, to govern working conditions and combat labour disputes. Starting from the early years of the Republican period, the book traces the evolution of the law of work in modern China right up to the reforms of the present day. It considers the structure of Chinese work law, drawing on both Chinese and Western scholarship to provide new insights into its unique features and assess where the law is innovative and where it is stagnant and unresponsive. The authors explore the various legal and extra-legal techniques successive Chinese governments have adopted to enforce work law and the responses of firms, workers and organizations to these practices.

China’s economic reforms have brought the country both major international clout and widespread domestic prosperity. At the same time, the reforms have led to significant social upheaval, particularly manifest in labour relations. Each year, several thousand disputes break out over working conditions, many of them violent, and the Chinese state has responded with both legal and political strategies.

This book investigates how Chinese governments have used law, and other forms of regulation, to govern working conditions and combat labour disputes. Starting from the early years of the Republican period, the book traces the evolution of the law of work in modern China right up to the reforms of the present day. It considers the structure of Chinese work law, drawing on both Chinese and Western scholarship to provide new insights into its unique features and assess where the law is innovative and where it is stagnant and unresponsive. The authors explore the various legal and extra-legal techniques successive Chinese governments have adopted to enforce work law and the responses of firms, workers and organizations to these practices.

The book presents an extensive investigation into the conceptual and empirical approaches by the Party-state to the management of Chinese citizen complaint and unrest. It explores how the Party-state responds to what it sees as potentially de-stabilizing social action such as public protest, discord, deviance and criminal behavior. This timely and important study reaches across a broad variety of areas within the legal sphere, including substantive criminal law and criminal procedure law reform, labour law, environment and land disputes, policing and surveillance, and anti-corruption drives. The central thread running through all the chapters concerns how the imperative of social stability has underpinned key Party-state approaches to social management and responses to crime, legal disputes and social unrest across the last decade in China.

This book will appeal to lawyers, political science scholars and social scientists in the area of China studies. Scholars generally interested in Chinese criminal law and criminal law procedures will also find much in this book that will be of interest to them.

Contributors: S. Biddulph, D. Peng, X. He, F. Hualing, G. Zhiyuan, E. Nesossi, M. Palmer, F. Sapio, M. S. Tanner, S. Trevaskes, B. van Rooij, Z. Wanhong