Cambridge University Press Growth and Survival: An Ecological Analysis of Court Reform in Urban China

"Despite the consolidation of Communist power and the encouragement of President Xi Jinping's cult of personality (Economy, 2019; Hernandez, 2018; Hernandez & Carlsen, 2017), the People's Republic of China (PRC) has also moved to expand judicial autonomy during Xi's term in office. As recently as 2016, The New York Times claimed that "China Grants Courts Greater Autonomy on Limited Matters" (Johnson, 2016), while the Wall Street Journal noted in 2014 that "China Tries to Hold On to Judges by Offering Freer Hand" (Chin, 2014) and The Economist opined that "Judges are often impotent in China's courtrooms. That might be changing" (The Economist, 2014)"-- Review In his ground-breaking book Growth and Survival, Kinkel creatively bridges the balkanized scholarships on courts and the legal profession in China with fine-grained empirical data and an ecological theory of judicial reform. Situating Chinese courts in both space and time, the book is an important contribution to China studies, sociolegal studies, and research on authoritarian judiciaries. Sida Liu, Associate Professor of Sociology and Law, University of Toronto About the Author Jonathan J. Kinkel is a Lecturer in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University, where his research has focused on the intersection between comparative politics, law and society, and Chinese studies. Beginning in 2022, he will also be affiliated with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. He is a past recipient of the Best Graduate Student Paper award from Law & Social Inquiry (LSI), and his research has appeared in journals including LSI, China Quarterly, and the Journal of East Asian Studies. This is his first book.