The Relationship between Precarity and Law

To illustrate the relationship between precarity and law and tease out the details of how the poor perceive and relate to the law, Nguyen focuses on stories about early withdrawal of social insurance benefits, early retirement from a former state-owned enterprise, and illegal house construction. In Chapter 3, Nguyen discusses how sometimes “immediate financial needs and impending future expenses push them to negotiate their social insurance rights and family obligations in a way that exposes them to even more precarious work situations and a lack of welfare support in their retirement” (52). Despite knowing that early withdrawal of social insurance benefits equates with the loss of legal rights to pensions and other social benefits, such as public health insurance, precarious circumstances forced factory workers to withdraw the social insurance benefits as a lump sum to meet their urgent needs. Their decision of early withdrawal reflects their perception of social insurance benefits as their own money and financial savings, which leads them to “mobilize their social insurance rights in a way that contradicts the law’s objective” (66). Likewise, Chapter 4 captures how factory workers who lost trust in the state and unions manipulated and exploited a gray area of the law to help them claim their deserved entitlement and sense of security through early retirement. To be qualified for early retirement, they turned to personal networks and even brokers to bribe medical professionals for documentation that proved their loss of capacity to work (86–88). Both early withdrawal of social insurance benefits and early retirement come with consequences that maintain and reinforce the precarity of the factory workers involved: the former ended up with less job security and lower salaries, while the latter’s pension was penalized by a significant deduction due to early retirement (68–69, 88).

Meanwhile, low-income residents who were eager to secure housing through illegal construction were ready to “leverage their personal and informal networks to negotiate with state authorities and subvert formal rules” (101). Illegal construction, or housebuilding in land areas not officially designated for residential purposes, is a prevalent practice among low-income residents (99). Its prevalence leads to a shared social acceptance of illegal construction as instrumental for one’s survival (106). Many residents were under the impression that “law can be bent and flexibly applied to cater to their survival needs as low-income citizens,” and illegal establishments should be left alone and allowed for the sake of one’s survival (109). This impression was reinforced by the fact that law enforcement had been lax for many years at the local level and that mass forced demolition was not feasible given the large number of illegal constructions (109, 116). Unfortunately, it turned out that illegal houses of the poor were always among the first to be smashed, and those of people with financial and social capital remained untouched by local authorities (114). As a result, low-income residents who engaged in illegal construction out of their precarity ended up in a more precarious situation after their violation of the law.

Legal Consciousness across Cultural Borders

In addition to documenting the interconnection between precarity and law through vivid stories across all three main chapters, Nguyen’s book also demonstrates the influential role of law’s moral legitimacy in shaping legal consciousness, which Nguyen defines as “the way an individual perceives of and acts according to the law” (7). It has broader implications beyond the Vietnamese context and can easily connect with existing and emergent studies on legal consciousness in East and Southeast Asia, such as the relationship between law and local norms, rightful resistance, and law and morality. To be specific, Nguyen strategically uses the umbrella term “law’s moral legitimacy” to capture several Vietnamese cultural elements that play a significant role in shaping the legal consciousness of factory workers and low-income residents. Framing it as a study on law’s moral legitimacy successfully opens more space for future cross-cultural conversations—it enables the readers to grasp the key argument without the need to understand deep cultural elements.

In Chapter 5, for example, Nguyen uses the stories of low-income residents to illustrate how ordinary citizens in Vietnam framed moral legitimacy and justice without relying heavily on cultural implications. Nguyen writes, “While state authority justifies demolition on the basis of the law, residents contend that the law should also take into account sentiment and compassion and embrace the precarious nature of their existence. This contention on the part of residents echoes the official Vietnamese approach of rule by sentiment, or ruling with ‘reason and sentiment.’” Although this approach inevitably risks missing the opportunity to capture the nuances of their reasoning embedded in local cultures in Vietnamese society, its focus on the broader theme of law’s moral obligation has the potential to invite law and society scholars researching other cultural contexts to join the conversation. Framing it as broad as the law’s moral legitimacy eases the reader’s concerns about the difficulty to grasp cultural terms and meanings.

Although I am not a specialist on Vietnamese culture and society, I feel comfortable in connecting Nguyen’s findings with the concept of qingli (loosely translates as what the majority of people consider to be just and fair) in my own research (Liu Reference Liu2018; Reference Liu2021), the analysis of the relationship between law and emotion in Hsiao-Tan Wang’s (Reference Wang2019) work, and the key themes in Jeffrey Martin’s (Reference Wang2019) book, Sentiment, Reason, and Law: Policing in the Republic of China on Taiwan, just to name a few. In fact, similar concepts can be found in various studies that discuss the gap between ordinary people’s understandings of what the law should be and the actual definition of right and wrong in the official legal system. These studies invoke a variety of terms, ranging from beliefs of righteousness, perceived justice from below, to wider normative arguments (see, for example, He, Wang, and Su Reference He, Wang and Su2013). Nguyen’s approach helps me conceive of a possible strategy for legal consciousness scholars focusing on Asian cultural contexts to collectively take Asia-based studies of legal consciousness beyond cultures to contribute to theory-building and challenge some dominant legal and political thoughts that have long been taken for granted in law and society scholarship.

Asia-Based Studies and the Future of Its Legal Consciousness Scholarship

For those who invoke culturally specific concepts to study legal consciousness in the Asian context, there is a tendency for them to be associated with cultural uniqueness regardless of how much the authors have tried to emphasize their broader implications. My research on the relationship between law and qingli falls under this category. So does Wang’s (Reference Wang2019) work on zijiren, a sophisticated Chinese cultural concept stressing the differential treatment and flexible boundaries between “one of us” and the rest. We, as well as many other Asian law and society scholars, are aware of the importance of generalization and theory building beyond our cultural contexts, but we are also confronted with the difficulty of explaining its deep cultural meanings in a more engaging and accessible way to readers who have little understanding of and potentially do not care about cultural values in Asian societies.

The Global North/Global South academic hierarchies further complicate the situation. As a law and society scholar studying legal consciousness in the Chinese context, I am familiar with the extra burden for scholars whose research focuses on societies outside North America to justify their generalizability. Not surprisingly, legal consciousness studies on Vietnam, China, and other Asian countries tend to be considered culturally specific and cannot travel beyond the Asian context. Given their otherness and uniqueness, legal consciousness scholars who study the “mainstream” usually can get away from the need to engage with Asia-based studies. Meanwhile, those whose research focuses on Asia are reminded again and again by reviewers of the importance of not only citing but also framing their research in directions set by North American scholars, even if it is only remotely related. The pressure to publish, especially for junior scholars and graduate students, inevitably shifts their attention and focus away from what they truly believe to be the juiciest and of greatest potential to contribute to the field.

The existing academic hierarchies, to some extent, help explain the somewhat divergent attitudes among graduate students writing on legal consciousness in Asian societies and some scholars in this field: the former are excited about conducting empirical legal consciousness studies, while the latter have expressed concerns about the future of the field even after the recent relational shift. Indeed, Asia has been a fertile region for legal consciousness scholarship. As Lynette Chua, David Engel, and Sida Liu (Reference Chua, Engel and Liu2023, 140) suggest in The Asian Law and Society Reader, “Asia-based studies of legal consciousness have led the way in raising new questions and proposing new frameworks for understanding the law-related thoughts and practices of individuals and groups.” The more excitement I have seen from graduate students, the more I feel obligated to emphasize the great potential for Asian legal consciousness studies to continue shaping law and society scholarship.Footnote ¹ Asia-based legal consciousness studies have much more to offer to the field than what we have currently seen. When the next generation of Asian law and society scholars has seen the opportunities and collected empirical sources to contribute to law and society scholarship, the least we can do is to defend the space for them to survive and thrive. To achieve this goal, we must come together to figure out a way to better translate culturally specific themes into more relatable knowledge for our audience outside Asia.

Nguyen’s Law and Precarity prompts me with one possible solution: to collectively develop common themes that are key to making sense of legal consciousness in the region in the hope of taking them beyond the Asian context. Nguyen’s focus on the broader concept of law’s moral legitimacy to discuss culturally specific concepts reminds me of the importance of making it easier for our readers to engage with our works. This is by no means to discourage Asian legal consciousness scholars from articulating nuanced cultural meanings. What is promising about this approach is for us to do as little as explicitly connecting our culturally specific terms and findings with a relatively broader umbrella concept that has the potential of capturing the commonalities across cultures in the region and beyond. By connecting qingli, beliefs of righteousness, perceived justice from below, among other culturally specific terms, together with a broader theme such as law’s moral legitimacy, we will be able to support one another’s research findings in a more explicit way that also makes it easier for readers who are not familiar with our cultures to join the conversation. While these individual studies may be telling different stories and have separate goals, connecting to a common theme helps collectively reiterate their potential to travel across and beyond cultures.