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Tigers without Teeth: The Pursuit of Justice in Contemporary China.
SCOTT WILSON. Lanham, Boulder, New York and London: Rowman
and Littleeld, 2015. xiii + 260 pp. \$75.00. ISBN 978-1-4422-3616-5
Runya Qiaoan
The China Quarterly / Volume 226 / June 2016, pp 573 - 574
DOI: 10.1017/S0305741016000497, Published online: 08 July 2016
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0305741016000497
How to cite this article:
Runya Qiaoan (2016). The China Quarterly, 226, pp 573-574 doi:10.1017/
S0305741016000497
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repression and brutality), the author has not seen the looming danger of the “mainlandization”
of Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. With such an orientation, Lo presents
the case of Islamic “terrorism” in Xinjiang uncritically. For these reasons,
whether the emergence of a security state in the PRC, or the “stability-maintenance
regime,” is a good thing for state-building and crime control can be debatable in the
context of globalization and democratization.
M I N G X I A
mxia@gc.cuny.edu
Tigers without Teeth: The Pursuit of Justice in Contemporary China
S COT T W I L S O N
Lanham, Boulder, New York and London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015
xiii + 260 pp. $75.00
ISBN 978-1-4422-3616-5 doi:10.1017/S0305741016000497
In February 2016, Beijing Zhongze Women’s Legal Counselling and Service Centre
was shut down by order of the authorities. Zhongze, a leading women’s legal aid centre
founded after the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing
in 1995, was just one of the civil society organizations that became “sensitive” after
the first drafting of China’s Foreign NGO Management Law in December 2014.
This recent development triggered many questions regarding, for instance, the role
of civil society organizations in China’s legal evolution and why the authoritarian
state tolerates certain rights-advocacy NGOs and blocks others. For anyone interested
in these issues, Wilson’s book, Tigers without Teeth: The Pursuit of Justice in
Contemporary China, is a must-read.
Wilson argues that China’s civil society organizations contribute to rights-based
litigations and their symbiotic growth speeds up China’s progress towards rule of
law. To illustrate this process, Wilson focuses on two looming crises in China: environmental
pollution and the HIV epidemic. Through a cogent analysis, Wilson shows
that deficiencies in China’s legal and political systems worsened these two crises over
the last two decades, but the intervention of civil society organizations assisted the
victims of pollution and HIV in litigation and effectively dispersed their accumulating
indignation.
Wilson notices that when it comes to individual litigations in these two fields, the
Chinese courts’ responses vary towards pollution victims and HIV carriers. In general,
environmental cases have a better chance of being taken to the court and are
more successful in terms of court verdicts than HIV cases. Wilson delves into opportunity
structure theory to explain this divergence. To be specific, the courts’ responses
are hugely influenced by the two ministries responsible for environmental pollution
and HIV – the ministry of environmental protection (MEP) and ministry of health
(MOH). While the environmental lawsuits aid the MEP to monitor polluting industries
and thus help the MEP to gain power, the HIV lawsuits cast light on the MOH’s
mismanagement of blood-supply control and therefore diminish the MOH’s legitimacy.
In a country where courts are far from independent, the practical concerns of
ministries have a substantial impact on the way litigations are taken and handled.
In addition to this bureaucratic peculiarity, Wilson reveals another feature in current
Chinese civil society, which is the underlying tension between GONGOs (governmental
NGOs) and grassroots NGOs. In environmental lawsuits, for example,
Book Reviews 573
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GONGOs have a higher chance of delivering the case and winning the battle. This
phenomenon, of course, can also be attributed to the dependency of the courts on
the state. Wilson believes we witness the practice of Gramsci’s theory of ideological
hegemony here: the state-backed GONGOs are tools of the Chinese state in the ideological
battle with grassroots organizations.
Through more than 100 interviews from Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Kunming
and Nanjing, Wilson adds new depth to scholarship on modern China studies by presenting
a detailed picture of Chinese civil society’s struggle for legal justice in the last
two decades. This book is unique in its in-depth analysis of the development of
China’s environmental law and health care law, so students and researchers who
are interested in these two socially and politically pertinent areas can find a great
deal of first-hand data here.
One of the shortcomings of this book is that while Wilson realizes the uneven and
fragmented nature of Chinese civil society across issue areas, he overlooks more fundamental
unevenness in Chinese civil society nowadays. This includes the unbalanced
development on the one hand between service-oriented NGOs and advocacy-oriented
NGOs, and on the other hand between local NGOs and foreign NGOs. This neglect
impedes Wilson finding a reasonable strategy for the “tiger” to grow “teeth.” Wilson
claims that “Chinese civil society organizations’ foreign ties and funding enhance autonomy
from China’s state and improve their capacity to offer criticism of state policies
and practices” (p. 208), so he suggests advancing the civil society situation and
legal environment by increasing NGOs’ international funding and linkages. Yet,
Zhongze’s fate has shown an opposite trend: with an increasingly severe situation
for foreign-linked NGOs since Wilson wrote this book, NGOs’ international linkage
can jeopardize their survival and, as a result, slow down legal evolution in China.
The book might also benefit from a brief account of legal developments arising
from NGOs’ efforts in other issue areas. It is true that Wilson has made a convincing
argument why environmental pollution and HIV/AIDS are eligible for special attention
in his analysis, but this book inevitably leaves readers wondering what would be
the legal evolution in other important issue areas such as labour rights, women’s
rights and so on.
Despite these issues, Tigers without Teeth is a high-quality and well-written academic
work that demands attention of anyone interested in the development of the
legal system and civil society in China.
R U N Y A Q I A O A N
qiaoan@mail.muni.cz
Urban Mobilizations and New Media in Contemporary China
Edited by L I S H E N G D O N G , H A N S P E T E R K R I E S I and D A N I E L K Ü B L E R
Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015
xvii + 193 pp. $104.00
ISBN 978-1-4724-3097-7 doi:10.1017/S0305741016000503
As the title indicates, this edited volume combines two of the most intriguing topics in
changing Chinese society: the rise of popular protests, especially in urban environments,
and the political communication revolution brought about by the internet.
Under the auspices of an institutional partnership between the Chinese Academy
of Social Sciences and the department of political science at the University of
574 The China Quarterly, 226, June 2016, pp. 560–592