China's judicial decisions database and what it means
Sinica Podcast
Kaiser Kuo
4.8 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 14 January 2021
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
By the end of 2019, Chinese courts had uploaded some 80 million court cases to a massive, centralized database — a gold mine not only for people working in the legal professions in China, but also for researchers interested in what the court decisions can tell us about Chinese jurisprudence, criminal and civil procedures, and Chinese society more broadly. This week on Sinica, we present a show recorded back in December 2019 — prelapsarian days, before shelter-in-place orders, travel restrictions, and remote podcasting. Kaiser speaks with Rachel Stern, a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law and in the UC Berkeley political science department, and with Ben Liebman, a professor of law and the director of the Center for Chinese Legal Studies at Columbia University. Both scholars have worked extensively with the database, and share their insights into why the Chinese government has pushed courts to upload cases to the database, and how it might transform the way that courts work in China.
7:19: What’s in the database, and how it’s unique to China
28:00: Pushing back against the techno-dystopian narrative
34:12: Creating a marketplace for legal implications
41:21: The limitations of artificial intelligence
Recommendations:
Rachel: A collection of translated essays written by Chinese intellectuals, titled Voices from the Chinese Century: Public Intellectual Debate from Contemporary China; Under Red Skies: Three Generations of Life, Loss, and Hope in China, by Karoline Kan; and the NüVoices podcast.
Ben: The works of artist Stuart Robertson.
Kaiser: The popular Chinese talk show Informal Talks (非正式会谈 fēi zhèng shì huì tán), available to watch on YouTube.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey folks. Back in December of 2019, I took a trip out to California and recorded a series of podcasts out there. |
| 0:07.6 | You might remember that series. This is the final installment of that series. |
| 0:12.6 | I know I waited an awfully long time to put this one out, but it will have been worth the wait, as you'll see, because my two guests are brilliant, and the topic is fascinating. |
| 0:20.8 | It's about China's legal |
| 0:22.3 | system and artificial intelligence and a very strange sort of intersection of these two things. |
| 0:29.4 | So that California series, if you'll recall, was funded by the Serica Initiative, which is |
| 0:34.9 | SubChina's sister nonprofit organization. You can look at our website to find out more about what the Serica initiative, which is Sub-China's sister nonprofit organization. |
| 0:42.1 | You can look at our website to find out more about what the Serica Initiative is doing. |
| 0:45.3 | Meanwhile, enjoy the show. Welcome to the Cynical podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with SubChina. |
| 1:01.3 | SubChina is simply the best way there is to keep on top of all the important news coming out of China. |
| 1:05.6 | Our indispensable daily newsletter features a roundup from the news from hundreds of sources plus links to the original |
| 1:11.1 | writing on our website. Sign up for sub-China access and you get all that and much more with |
| 1:15.8 | stories and everything from the Belt and Road to local entrepreneurship and innovation in China, |
| 1:19.8 | from the travails of ethnically Chinese researchers in the U.S. in this age of creeping McCarthyism |
| 1:24.3 | to China's ongoing extra-legal detainment of hundreds of thousands or by some |
| 1:28.9 | estimates over a million Uyghurs and other Muslims in China's Xinjiang region. |
| 1:33.6 | We are sure you'll agree it's a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation |
| 1:38.6 | that is reshaping the world. |
| 1:40.7 | I'm Kaiser Guo, and today I am at my beloved alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley, |
| 1:45.6 | for the last in this series of podcasts from the Golden State. I have had a terrific time here |
| 1:50.6 | in California and as you can imagine it's been really stimulating to talk to so many people on so many |
| 1:54.9 | disparate topics in such a short time. It's a good thing to stress test your own love of your work. |
... |
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