Speaker: Professor Jieren Hu, Professor, Law School, Zhejiang University City College
Date: 6 Sep 2023 (Wednesday)
Time: 04:00 p.m. to 05:30 p.m. (Hong Kong Time).
Venue: Room 422, Sino Building, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Organizers: Chinese Law Programme, HKIAPS, CUHK; Department of Sociology, CUHK
Abstract:
Drawing on intensive fieldwork conducted in China from 2019 to 2022, this article argues that the Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping’s rule is now widely applying a mode of digital governance to contain social grievances and strengthen social stability. Although digital technology itself does help facilitate dispute resolution and stability maintenance by more effectively defusing collective actions and preventing/settling social disputes, the political system and power structure under authoritarianism, to a larger extent, shapes and affects the operation and outcome of digital governance. Despite that the party-state is committed to rule by law and promoting a digital governance “by law and policy,” the “state of exception” is deployed when it has to rely on digital governance “beyond law and policy” in order to serve the necessity of consolidating its political power and ruling base when social stability is threatened. However, this not only fails to construct an accountable state image but would lead to counterproductive outcomes. The study of digital governance in China adds new elements to the explanation of the condition for a “state of exception” in authoritarian states such as China and also answers why the Chinese government tries to prevent and settle disputes while keeping creating them in the digital age.
Keywords: Digital governance, digital technology, dispute resolution, stability maintenance, China
About the Speaker:
Prof. Jieren HU is a professor in the Law School at Zhejiang University City College and a visiting professor in the Faculty of Law and Sociology at Qinghai Normal University. She is also the visiting scholar in the Center for China Studies at UC Berkeley, U.S.A. She got her Ph. D at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2009 and worked as a post-doc fellow at Hong Kong Baptist University. She once worked as an associate professor in the Law School at Tongji University. Her researches focus on mediation, dispute resolution and social governance in China. She has published quite a number of English and Chinese books, journal papers, and book chapters in Journal of Contemporary China, China Review, Asian Survey, China Information, China Perspectives, China: An International Journal, etc. She is the “double-thousand” expert nominated by the State Council of China, the special mediator of the Second Intermediary Court in Shanghai, and the Member of Association of Hong Kong and Macao Law in Shanghai Law Society and Association of Sociology of Law in Shanghai Law Society.
