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COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF ASIAN LAW
COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF ASIAN LAW
VOLUME 36 SPRING 2025 ISSUE 1
Article
THE DUAL TALES OF MORALIZING COURTS: EXAMINING PARTY-
RELATED MORALIZING KEYWORDS IN CIVIL JUDGMENTS
Eva (Wenwa) Gao and Xiaohan Wu'
Combining Rule of Virtue with Rule of Law, a policy initiative in
China that could be traced back to the governance of President Jiang
Zemin,2 has drawn widespread attentionfrom Western scholarship over the
past few years. But how is this initiative carried out in everyday judicial
decisions? The first part of this article tries to answer this question by
searching for a group of 18 morality-related and Party-sanctioned
keywords in publicly issued civil cases between 2001 and 2018. Here, we
found judicial decisions incorporating extra-legal moralizing passages
across a wide range of locations, court levels, subject matters, and
individual judges. These judicial opinions include moralizing lectures on
various topics and in various styles; and we further analyze their rhetoric
and function through a close reading of over 1,500 sample cases. The
second part of this article then examines whether this judicial practice
accurately reflects the top-down policy initiative and seeks to explain the
identified gaps by offering a second, bottom-up motivation for judicial
moralizing. In conclusion, we posit that Chinese judges include Party-
sanctioned moralizing language in their opinions to serve dual purposes:
both to satisfy a political mission imposed from the top, and to win over
populist trust and support on their own accord. We end with an analysis of
1 Eva (Wenwa) Gao was, from 2019 to 2020, a post-doc research scholar at Columbia Law School,
supervised by Prof. Benjamin L. Liebman. Xiaohan Wu is a Ph.D. candidate in the Political Science
Department of The University of California, San Diego. From 2018 to 2020, she worked as a data
science research associate at Columbia Law School. This draft was substantially developed during
the authors' joint time at Columbia Law School. We owe a great debt to Prof. Benjamin L. Liebman,
Prof. Rachel Stern, and Prof. Molly E. Roberts for their invaluable guidance and insights, to Jieun
Kim for her helpful comments and suggestions, to the team of research assistants at Columbia Law
School for their tireless work and support, and to the editorial board of Columbia Journal of Asian
Law for their meticulous and constructive edits that helped improve this paper. All errors and
omissions are our own.
2 All references to Chinese names in this article are presented with the family name (last name) first,
followed by the given name.
1
2025]](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/colas36&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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