Introduction

Though of ancient origin, the concept of cosmopolitanism remains salient, not least within contemporary rights discourse (Anderson-Gold 2001; Tan 2004; Appiah 2006; Benhabib 2006; Fine 2007; Douzinas 2007). The concept's normative emphasis on the ideal of value being shared by all of humanity, within circles of affiliation going beyond family, the local, or even national ties (Nussbaum 1997: 9), helpfully underlines the universality of each human life ‘beyond … the ties of kith and kin’ (Appiah 2006: xv). Its institutional implications promulgate the ideal of a common community which can be viewed as reflected in the emergence of post-1945 federations of nations which sponsor international human rights and humanitarian laws.

Yet, can these concepts of cosmopolitanism hold fast in the face of contemporary terrorism? Jihadi movements like Al-Qa'ida have been criticised as ‘counter-cosmopolitans’ (Appiah 2006: 143). Their doctrine denies plural value, and their action consists too often of brutal and catastrophic attacks in apparent denial of any shared humanity. In turn, states are motivated by terrorism to raise the drawbridge on cosmopolitan comity and to adopt exceptionalism in foreign affairs (described in the chapter by Jason Ralph) and irreconcilable forms of illiberal nationalism at home. Governments become willing to demonise those who reject their values (Thobani 2007) and to proffer for their own purposes a ruthless and violent ‘lesser evil’ in order to combat the greater evil of terrorism, so that human rights are no longer trumps in the age of terror, even against torture (Ignatieff 2004; Dershowitz 2002).

What has been learned from almost three decades of urban violence in disadvantaged neighbourhoods? The forms of violence conducted by male youths in such areas are frequently conveyed by the media. Places and potentially violent actors are both perceived as risks. Risks rather than feelings of insecurity are what governments want to anticipate. The questions that our era has to confront were hardly confronted before. The political manipulation of risk, threat and danger linked to unknown youths is made easier when mainstream societies lack markers and the necessary distance to deconstruct the fears impacting on their daily life. All over Europe, since 9/11, a noticeable change has been observed among national and local governments advocating principles of precaution and strict policies of identification, surveillance and repression of ‘suspects’. For instance, that the term Muslim has implicitly linked ethnic forms of violence in relegated neighbourhoods and threats of home-grown terrorism in the media rhetoric has allowed ‘entrepreneurs’ to benefit from such representations producing fears, from the media to the security market itself. A new regime order prevails in Europe giving legitimacy to policies of order at the expense of some people's liberties. Such regime's aims are the securisation of territories and the detection of ‘suspects’. But the task being endless, urban governance is taking a leadership role on many aspects, a major one being inclusiveness as a condition of security supported by a preventative approach.

To govern a problem such as ‘urban safety’, we first need to visualise it and name it. And any act of visualisation employs a particular scale – whether or not the scale is consciously chosen out of a set, or whether one simply takes up a certain scale without considering alternatives. A crucial insight of recent work on space and governance is that scale-effects pervade all visualisation, not just cartography and other two-dimensional representations. Standing on a mountain top to look down at one's town, for instance, one is using a different scale than that employed in – or as some scholars would put it, constituted by – walking down one's street. Scale is thus a fundamental feature or component of all efforts to render the world in thought.

In empirical social science, particularly in survey-based research, the terms ‘scale’ and ‘scaling’ are by no means absent. When researchers ponder whether they should assign numbers to the multiple-choice answers to a question or whether it is best to use qualitative terms such as ‘occasionally’ and ‘frequently’, they say they are thinking about ‘scaling’. Scaling in this sense is an issue that requires thought because even when questions have been written in such a way as to discourage ambiguity and creativity among respondents, anything more complicated than a yes-or-no answer requires paying attention to the implications of how responses are ‘scaled’.

Assessing the development of law in China is a challenging proposition by any standard. One provincial government official I interviewed described current conditions with uncommon eloquence:

He continued:

To be sure, legal development does involve changing minds, and it does demand adjustment and adaptation both by officials and by citizens. Adaptation and adjustment are pressing concerns. But they are not the only, or necessarily even the most important reasons why legal development has not proceeded in the same way or at the same pace across China, up and down the Chinese administrative hierarchy or across the state-society divide.

After thirty years of reform in China, one can legitimately wonder whether individual or local experiences with the Maoist state are still relevant to the lives of ordinary Chinese. The shift to a market economy; the radical transformation of the workplace, housing, consumptions patterns; and countless other aspects of daily life leave few observational clues about the long-term consequences of three decades of Maoism. Few would question the historical importance of the Chinese revolution, but it is incumbent on students of contemporary issues to demonstrate empirically whether nearly one generation after the regime's break from Maoism, individual decisions and beliefs are still decisively linked to these historical events.

As the People's Republic of China (PRC) approaches its seventh decade, we may be even less willing to explore the relevance of the 1949 divide between the so-called “old” and “new” Chinas. Social scientists who conduct survey research in the PRC no longer can interview respondents with living memories of the Nationalist regime. Furthermore, the regime's long-standing emphasis on sharply demarcating the post-1949 political and social landscape from China's historical experience has further weakened interest in exploring whether and how antecedent regimes have had any impact on contemporary mass opinion and behavior. Yet several aspects of China's reform era compel observers to look back in search of explanations that cannot be easily rooted in contemporary institutional or cultural settings.

A major question in the law and society literature is the effect of legal experience on individual attitudes toward legal institutions, in particular the court system. Positive attitudes and confidence in the legal system are important for generating citizen trust and confidence in government generally and also for inculcating citizen values and behavior that support the rule of law and encourage legal (and peaceful) resolution of disputes and grievances more specifically. Thus, these values are important for sustaining democracy. For a country like China, in transition from state socialism, in which legal modes of governance and social control were less common than administrative edicts, Communist Party campaigns, and state repression, attempts to build an effective legal system are also linked to limited political reform. Rule of law building is the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) attempt to build more effective and efficient governance, while making an end run around democratization and the sharing of political power. In this case, creating positive citizen attitudes toward the legal system is part of a strategy to avoid democracy.

In this chapter, we examine how experience with the legal system affects Chinese citizens' evaluation of the courts through a series of comparisons between those who have used the law to resolve an employment dispute and those who have not as well as comparisons between disputants who remained positive and confident in the legal system and disputants who were fully disillusioned and negative.

Gruesome media accounts from both China and abroad on the performance of Chinese legal institutions, perhaps best exemplified by the Pulitzer Prize–winning series on “ragged justice,” are consistent with scholarly reports of pervasive travesties of justice in the court system and abuses of power in the police system. Notwithstanding this conventional story of endemic failures in China's legal system, survey evidence tells the opposite story: highly positive popular perceptions of – and an overwhelming popular willingness to mobilize – both the courts and the police. Which of these two seemingly contradictory stories is correct? In this chapter, we use survey data from Beijing and rural China on popular perceptions of official justice and on firsthand assessments of encounters with official justice to argue that the story of upbeat perceptions and the story of downbeat encounters paradoxically are both correct.

Our analysis is divided into two steps. First, we analyze general perceptions of the performance of the legal system. Here we consider public attitudes toward, popular confidence in, and popular support for official justice – defined in this chapter as the courts and the police. Second, we analyze personal assessments of direct encounters with official justice. Whereas the first analytical step encompasses all individuals regardless of whether or not they reported prior experience in the legal system, the second is limited to aggrieved individuals who brought their grievances to some part of the legal system.

As has often been pointed out, “China's major problem is still the rural problem, and one of the most important tasks of the modernization of Chinese society is the modernization of rural society; anyone who is really concerned about the happiness and sorrow of the Chinese people is certainly concerned about the life of those people at the bottom of the society.” China's growing gaps between urban and rural areas and between rich and poor continue to challenge China's legal reforms. Whether China becomes a rule of law state will depend on whether legal reforms can reach deep into the rural population.

This chapter examines “grassroots” legal services in China's rural areas. “Grassroots level” refers to cities and districts at the county level, township, town, and subdistrict offices, and the so-called “detached judicial tribunals.” “Legal services” include a range of activities from legal representation in litigation to the handling of nonlitigation legal matters, mediation of disputes, assistance in notarization and testimony, legal consultancy, and assistance in the writing of legal documents. Grassroots legal-services offices provide legal services to a wide range of clients from governmental agencies, self-governed mass organizations, government-sponsored institutions and enterprises, social entities, and individual businessmen, partnerships, and citizens within the jurisdiction.

In analyzing grassroots legal services, we find a complex relationship between these offices and other state administrative organs (local justice offices – the sifabu), state judicial organs (grassroots people's courts), self-governing mass organizations (people's mediation commissions), and other legal-services institutions (legal aid and law firms).

The Old Latin maxim ex oriente lux, ex occidente lex (from the East, light; from the West, law) evinces a deep assumption about the relationship between the East and law – that is, although civilization began in the East, the West is the source of rationality and law. Indeed, much of this assumption lies in present-day “rule of law” programs as they are often transported from the West to transitional economies in the East and South. Rule of law, with its rationality and predictability, is said to be fundamental to a market economy. Its ability to check abusive arbitrary powers is believed to go hand in hand with democratic polities. Pointing to today's industrial democracies, reformers have concluded that rule of law is necessary for economic development and political liberalization.

Yet the challenges to these assumptions are numerous, ranging from whether there is such an East/West divide and, if so, whether the East is really antithetical to law; to the definition of “rule of law” itself and whether legal institutions are indeed transplantable. Furthermore, even as the rule of law has become a new rallying cry for global missionaries, reformers recognize that the rule of law is an exceedingly elusive notion. If “it is not already firmly in place, the rule of law appears mysteriously difficult to establish.”

In its thirty years of economic reforms, China has challenged the pairing of law, markets, and democracy.