from Part I - Corruption, Law, and Politics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2025
In this chapter, I provide a more textured picture of corruption in China’s courts. First, I find that the scale of judicial corruption in China is larger than was reported by the SPC. Second, I unpack judicial corruption with a four-filter scheme, separating prevalent conducts from the less prevalent and then provide a statistical description of the more prevalent types of misconduct, using a self-compiled dataset. I find that the predominant type of judicial corruption is the abuse of judicial discretion for self-enrichment. This type of corruption is ubiquitous in China’s courts, regardless of the type of the court where a judge serves, the type of the case concerned, and the stage of a litigation process where corruption takes place. My findings render some popular explanations of judicial corruption in China incomplete, which prompts further investigation of judicial decision-making in these courts in the next chapter.
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