Courtroom Live Broadcast in China: Its Effect on Judicial Legitimacy

Since 2013, the Chinese government has been promoting judicial transparency by requiring courts at different levels and in different regions to publish judge decisions and broadcast court trials online. By January 2018, there are more than 33 million written decisions and 630 thousand trial videos released on the official websites. This paper examines the radical reform of courtroom live broadcast and aims to answer two questions. First, how does this reform on judicial transparency affect courts and legal professionals’ behavior in the trial process? I research the official reports and internal notes in the local courts in Guangdong, China, to reveal court’s norms in determining cases to be broadcasted. I also interview 50 court staff, judges and lawyers to learn about their attitude towards courtroom live broadcast. Corresponding to the existing study on multiple pressure sources in the Chinese courts (Wang and Liu, 2017), I find that the fact of trial broadcast amplifies social pressure on judges’ decision making regardless of the selection bias. The paper further studies how the reform, in a form of mass media, affects people’s trust in the legal system and the existing regime. Existing literature on the rule of law in non-democracies generally argues that authoritarian regimes can use legal reform to improve public efficacy and encourage people to channel disputes through a formal legal institution instead of contentious actions. In this paper, I propose an alternative theory to the existing literature: increasing transparency in court trial process polarizes people’s existed predisposition of the judicial system. I conduct a survey experiment with 200 Chinese college students to test the effect of courtroom video, finding that increasing transparency in criminal trial is likely to reinforce people’s belief of procedural justice and increase their confidence in the legal institution, while not affecting the people who has a belief of substantial justice. The study also shows that when controlling legal knowledge, partial information of court trial broadcast has the greatest and positive effect on people’s trust in the courts; however, this effect diminishes when complete information (“the trial videos are pre-selected by the government”) is given to the respondents. The two studies presented in this paper, together with the data of other national surveys, show the complicated relationship between judicial transparency and regime legitimacy in authoritarian regimes. The legal reform does not necessarily achieve what the government intended to. Instead, it may cripple judicial legitimacy, reinforce people’s legal consciousness and the support for procedural justice, which both positively associate with democratic ideology.