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Abstract
In this dissertation, I study the administrative litigation system of China because without a national-level election or freedom of expression, filing a lawsuit is one of the few ways that Chinese citizens can influence their political authorities. However, the system is fundamentally controlled by the regime, not independent from politics. Under such circumstances, I ask what political roles this administrative litigation system plays in China as an authoritarian state, both for the leadership and for the public.
I argue in the first part of the dissertation that the authoritarian leadership controls public dissent through the administrative litigation system. Specifically, I show that when the citizens’ challenges against the government are non-threatening, then the regime is likely to adopt concession, but when the challenges are potentially threatening, then the regime adopts repression. I further show that China allows the state-controlled media to cover administrative disputes in the court to signal such a threshold of acceptable challenges against the state. In the second part of this dissertation, I turn to the citizen-side stories and argue that despite knowing that they are not likely to win against the government and that there might be political retaliation from the government, some Chinese citizens still want to sue their government because they want to face their administrators and teach them about their wrongdoings. I provide evidence for my arguments in two ways. First, I analyze my original quantified dataset from the entirety of all administrative rulings published in China between 2014 and 2018. Second, I provide interviews from my fieldwork in China.
This dissertation contributes to the field of comparative politics by studying the administrative litigation system, an under-examined topic within quasi-democratic institutions. The dissertation also brings individuals living under authoritarian rule to the center of scholarly attention alongside the leadership by including both state- and citizen-side stories. It further includes analysis of a new dataset. At the same time, it provides rich dialogues and context recorded from my fieldwork interviews.