Access to justice for the Chinese consumer—Handling consumer disputes in contemporary China. LingZhou. Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2020

• Published date: 01 December 2020
• Author: Carrie S. Shang
• Date: 01 December 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/crq.21289

BOOK REVIEW

Access to justice for the Chinese

consumer—Handling consumer disputes

in contemporary China

Ling Zhou

Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2020

China, the second-largest economic powerhouse in the world, is projected to surpass the

U.S. gross domestic product and dominate the world economy in the coming decades. Due to

the cyclical effect of rising income and education levels of Chinese consumers, uprising local

consumption slowly distorts the consumer-retailer dynamic. As China's decision-makers enjoy

the high status of Chinese consumers putting pressure and resistance to some free market poli-

cies as demonstrated in the recent Dolce & Gabbana and National Basketball Association brand

crisis, they themselves also need to carefully deal with political actions expressed by consumers

through market and legal mechanisms (Parker, 2007; Sánchez & Lui, 2019). This mixed inten-

tion of Chinese leaders has given rise to unique difficulties of designing consumer grievance

procedures in China, which needs to be powerful enough to absorb consumer-retailer tension

to promote social harmony and contain unrest, while flexible enough to nurture a certain level

of consumer activism needed by the country to showcase its captive market force. China's con-

sumer dispute resolution processes therefore carry a chameleon appearance. At one end the

recently revised Consumer Protection Law (2013) and the Civil Procedure Law (2017) have

allowed consumer public interest litigation as limited-in-scope “class claims.”On the other end

informal and extra-judicial channels are more frequently utilized by Chinese consumers seek-

ing various types of redress, but details of those cases are often then removed from the public

light.

Given this confusing landscape, it is not surprising that China's consumer grievance han-

dling procedure is largely under-studied. Although it has continuously sparked intense interest

among English-speaking scholars and commentators, few have had the guts and will to

approach this topic in a holistic way (pp. 7, 8). Against this backdrop, Dr Ling Zhou, currently a

research associate at the Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies of the Chinese University

of Hong Kong released Access to Justice for the Chinese Consumer—Handling Consumer Disputes

in Contemporary China in 2020. The work was inspired by her DPhill research done at the

Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, based on invaluable data collected from a year of field

work of “participation observation and in-depth interviews through internships”(p. 3) of

important consumer organizations and administrative bodies in Shenzhen, a Southern China

city of thriving technology trade and cross-border commerce. To put Shenzhen's consumption

power into a dispute resolution context, the local Consumer Council “deals with more than

20,000 complaints each year”(p. 48), a number not including cases that are resolved through

Received: 8 September 2020 Accepted: 9 September 2020

DOI: 10.1002/crq.21289

Conflict Resolution Quarterly. 2020;38:87–90. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/crq © 2020 Wiley Periodicals LLC 87