Research

Strangers and Intimates: How Law Inflects Subjectivity and Experience in China

This dissertation is about how modern forms of law interact with culture, subjectivities, and social morality. The argument builds upon an ethnographic investigation of law in everyday life among Reform-generation residents of Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, in the People’s Republic of China. Departing from approaches that foreground law’s coercive functions (especially in authoritarian China), my approach emphasizes law as a cultural ideology that contributes to forming identities and subjectivities. By shifting focus from the state to subjectivities that emerge through legal imaginings and interactions, this dissertation reveals how recent legal reforms in China have impacted ordinary people’s understandings of meaning, morality, relationships, and self in the midst of the massive structural upheavals characterizing 21st century China.

The analysis incorporates a grassroots-level vantage of law in three exemplary scenarios of everyday Chinese life—traffic accidents, divorce, and filial responsibility. Based on 17 months of field research conducted in Chengdu, it employs multi-sited ethnography, court judgments, and media reporting to show how the Chinese state’s embrace of law and legal ideologies manifests in, resonates with, and departs from people’s basic assumptions, desires, and fantasies about, for example, how to treat strangers, the purpose of marriage, and the obligations that children owe their parents. These ethnographic observations support the dissertation’s two most distinctive findings: (1) That the legal subject emerging in China, unlike the atomized individual posited in liberal theories of rational law, is embedded in networks of reciprocal relationships; and (2) that an analysis focused on what I term “legally enabled subjectivity” facilitates understanding how and why my interlocutors have formed particular affective, ethical, and (in some respects) unconscious orientations towards the law, the various subject positions law prescribes, and the recognition law confers. This perspective illuminates the imaginative ways that individuals exercise agency in the production of law’s life in the world. The dissertation’s conclusion that law interacts intimately with people’s sense of self and sociality invites viewing law’s role in other societies in similar terms.

Adjudicating Filial Piety: Law, Legitimacy, and Moral Authority in the PRC

Filial responsibility in China has long been not only a moral or cultural, but also a legal obligation. Despite common understandings that suggest that Chinese parents are reluctant to sue their children, national data suggests that such lawsuits have been steadily increasing in recent years. This paper analyzes how judgments in one such set of lawsuits – those invoking a 2013 amendment to the PRC Elderly Protection Law mandating that adult children visit and check-in on their parents frequently – demonstrate a case of how the Party-state under Xi Jinping is shifting from a strategy of neoliberal privatization towards consolidating authority under moralizing rubrics binding Party legitimacy to an historicized notion of moral nationhood. Using ethnography of Reform-generation Chinese people and qualitative analysis of how Chinese judges are interpreting their mandate to enforce this new “duty to care about,” in this paper I argue that the law is an important strategy by which the state seeks to associate itself with a transcendental “essence” of Chinese nationhood. Legal power holders claim authority as locutors of Chinese morality, in particular by invoking and emphasizing the cultural prominence of the parent-child relationship. I suggest that, from the perspective of elderly maintenance lawsuits, what is happening in Chinese politics is best viewed as the consolidation of authoritarian legitimacy through the cultivation of an ethos of national rejuvenation couched in an appeal to invented moral tradition.

Gendering Filial Duty: The logic of intergenerational obligations in Chinese elderly maintenance lawsuits

This article analyzes how patterns in elderly maintenance lawsuits demonstrate a gendered logic of filial responsibility in late-Reform China. Using quantitative and qualitative analysis of legal judgments filed between 2013 and 2018, I find that although scholars have demonstrated how multiple generations of the one-child policy have elevated the cultural perception of daughters as filial exemplars (Gaetano 2004; Miller 2004; Shi 2009; Yi et al. 2016) , patterns evident in lawsuits suggest the persistence of gendered expectations—especially in the relationship between mothers and sons. I argue that the law is an important venue of contestation about gendered manifestations and cultural expectations of filial responsibility and elderly care in contemporary China. I argue that the law is an important venue of contestation about gendered manifestations and expectations of filial responsibility and elderly care in contemporary China.

“It’s Just for Show, Just Because it Looks Nice”: Justice, Usefulness, and the Rule of Law (with Chinese Characteristics)

Since the 2015 session of the National People’s Congress that emphasized the development of rule of law as a government priority, the Chinese state has sought to operationalize, institutionalize, and implement what it deems a distinctively Chinese rule of law that accommodates both state imperatives towards global modernization and the maintenance of authoritarian rule.  This paper considers the formation and circulation of an “authoritative discourse” (Bakhtin 1984; see also Yurchak 2005; Hansen 2017) of Chinese legality in Chengdu, Sichuan. Using insights gleaned from ethnography, autoethnography, and a series of object-response interviews (Morill and Musheno 2018) relating to to “rule of law” (fazhi) and “justice” (gongzheng) propaganda, she demonstrates how cynical utterances present implicit assumptions and desires about law and basic forms of human life in post-Reform China (Steinmüller 2014).