Jie Wu

This chapter examines extreme medical disputes—hospital violence—and the government’s responses. In the first decade of the 2000s, violence against doctors (yinao) in the workplace was repeatedly reported. As a new type of social conflict, hospital violence is easily and quickly politicized and escalates into mass incidents targeting health institutions. This chapter aims to fill the scholarly gap in tracing the government responses towards hospital violence and its outcomes. I first theorize the behaviors of hospital violence from the rightful resistance perspective by examining their mobilizing structure, framing strategies, sequential targeting tactics, etc. Drawing on intensive interviews and media data, I find that the government has adopted selective punishment to avoid blame and dispute escalation. This chapter demonstrates that the government’s selective punishment strategies are contingent upon three factors: (1) the degree of violence, (2) the disputants’ strategies, and (3) the disputants’ moral power. This study suggests that selective law enforcement has led hospitals to adopt self-protection strategies and has provided further political space for disruptive behaviors in health institutions.

How did medical dispute resolution become politicized in China? This chapter examines the changing landscape of medical dispute resolution from the 1990s to Xi’s current reign. It documents the changing strategies and attitudes the government applied and adaptative institutions in absorbing and managing social disputes in China. In the 1990s, bureaucratic concerns and the underdeveloped legal system constrained citizens’ agency in holding hospitals and doctors accountable. Since 2002, under the rule of law, the new Medical Malpractice Regulation has encouraged patients to use the law as a weapon to address their disputes. However, law mobilization has coincided with the high tide of rights protection, leading to increased dispute cases against hospitals, and even collective actions targeting public health institutions. The fragmented responses to social disputes fail to address the citizens’ grievance and yet further destabilize the regime. Today, to maintain social stability, social dispute resolution institutions have been institutionalized, adapted from legal channels to a traditional Maoist weapon—People’s Mediation Institutions. This chapter theorizes the mediation channel’s institutional constraints and politicized outcomes. It explains how the dynamic interaction between the rule of law, social power, and stability maintenance influences the mediation channel in China.

This chapter examines the rise of the People’s Mediation in dealing with the rising medical disputes as well as absorbing social grievances. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in people’s mediation, I explained why and how the mediators have addressed social grievances in an efficient manner and achieve political and social goals simultaneously. I find that the mediation process was full of power interactions. Specifically, I summarize a series of mediators’ daily practices and theorize it as politicization, affective and bargaining strategies, which discourage and deter the (potential) collective actions, satisfy the disputants’ psychological demands and provide monetary compensation to settle the case respectively. By doing so, it jointly led to the high mediation success rate. This chapter enhances our understanding of the adaptive role of the People’s Mediation channel from an institutional perspective and contributes to crystalizing the dynamical strategies in the mediation process.

This book examines how the law, political concerns, and social factors jointly shape China’s politicized medical dispute resolution process. This concluding chapter revisits how patients’, mediators’, and doctors’ lives are connected through medical dispute resolution. It concludes and summarizes the key findings of the previous chapters, their theoretical implications, and the book’s limitations. The politicization of medical dispute resolution involves the politicization of issues, institutions, and the dispute resolution process and its outcomes. By doing so, it discourages potential collective actions and shifts disputants’ focus from rights- and law-related concerns to monetary claims. This chapter suggests that the politicization of social dispute resolution may maintain social stability but does so at the longer-term cost of commercializing patient-doctor relations, eroding social trust, and endangering the foundation of the rule of law.

This opening chapter is an introduction of the background of the Chinese health system and the rise of collective action in the transition era. It first presents the puzzle why the hospital violence occurred in China with limited political space, and how the government deal with these disputes escalated from social disputes. Then introduces the background of the Chinese health system in a transition era. Later, it engages with the theories of contentious politics and proposes the theoretical contributions of this book. Finally, it presents the methods and structure of the book.

This chapter dives into investigating the rationale embedded in the compensation distribution to settle medical disputes, drawing on evidence from people’s mediation committees of medical disputes. This chapter argues that the People’s mediation committee has performed as a centralized bargaining channel to promote compensation distribution systematically to settle the dispute. Through the mediation channel, the focus of the dispute resolution also shifted from rights discourse to responding the monetary compensation claims raised by the disputants, which also de-politicized the nature of the social disputes. By reviewing medical dispute case files empirically, I find that compensation outcomes may be influenced by a series of interactions of distributive justice, political stability reasons, and economic concerns. Through the mediation channel, the Chinese government could resort to a non-coercive and preventive approach to manage social disputes flexibly.

This book investigates the politicization process of social dispute resolution and its unintended consequences, under the context of over 70 percent of China’s public hospitals have experienced hospital violence, with patients acting violently toward medical workers to express anger, protect their rights, or monetary reasons. The examination of interactions between patients, hospitals, and government representatives in China is based on fieldwork conducted in a Chinese mega-city from 2015 to 2017, combining over 700 archival mediation cases, 156 hospital violence cases and their legal outcomes, and 72 in-depth interviews with patients, mediators, and healthcare professionals. It examines the rise of mediation and finds how the party-state utilizes the traditional mediation channel to address emerging social disputes, and the art of persuasion in mediation and finds how political stability and moral concerns influence and shaped their strategies and mediation outcomes. The first-hand data and valuable archival documents help depict citizens’ social dispute resolution process under authoritarianism and reflect another facet of non-electoral political participation under authoritarianism, also enriching the understanding of evolving government strategies in dispute resolution. This book is reader-friendly and could engage a wide and dynamic audience of researchers, healthcare professionals, and readers interested in medical sociology, regional study, or political participation in China.

The automatic summarization of judgment documents is a challenging task due to their length and the dispersed nature of the important information they contain. The prevailing approach to tackling the summarization of lengthy documents involves the integration of both extractive and abstractive summarization models. However, current extractive models face challenges in capturing all essential details due to the scattered distribution of pertinent information within judgment documents. Additionally, the existing abstractive models still grapple with the problem of "hallucinations" which leads to generating inaccurate information. In our work, we proposed a novel hybrid legal summarization method that incorporates legal domain knowledge into both the extractive model and abstractive model. The method consists of two parts: (1) The rhetorical role of sentences is identified by the sentence-level sequence labeling method, and the rhetorical information is integrated into the extractive model based on WoBERT through the conditional normalization to ensure that the identification of key sentences is both precise and complete. (2) The pre-trained model RoFormer is combined with Seq2Seq to construct a long text summarization model, and the prior knowledge in the external resources and the document itself is introduced into the decoding process to improve the faithfulness and coherence of the composed summary. In addition, the contrastive learning strategy is employed during the training process to enhance the robustness of the abstractive model. Experimental results on the CAIL2020 dataset show that the proposed model is superior to the baseline methods. Furthermore, our method outperforms GPT and other LLMs in processing judgment documents.

The metaverse concept constructs a virtual world parallel to the real world. The social economic dynamics model establishes a systematic model for social economic dynamics simulation that integrates macroeconomy and microeconomy based on modeling mechanism of the new theory of value by analogy with Newtonian mechanics and the modeling approach of Agent-based computational economics. This article describes the SED model’s modeling mechanisms, modeling rules, and behavior equations. At the same time, this article introduces the methods, testing standards, and some typical cases about using the SED model to generate the economic digital twin systems. By doing so, we hope to demonstrate that the method of computer simulation experiment based on the SED model is a scientific empirical method, which has more advantages than the existing empirical research methods in economics. The SED model, which can be fully used to form an economic engine and construct a virtual economic system by digital twin method, can be integrated with the extant physical engine in the metaverse concept to build a virtual world consisting of physics, economy, culture, and politics that is close to and coexists with reality.

This study was designed to estimate the associations between self-efficacy and professional identity. A total of 1,051 freshmen nursing students from the Be Resilient to Nursing Career program were recruited from four universities between September and November 2020. A latent profile and moderated meditation analysis were performed. Four profiles of self-efficacy were identified and named as Lowest, Med-low, Med-high, and Highest. The mediating role of resilience and the moderating effect of role models were also identified. Therefore, self-efficacy, resilience, and role models may be three important factors to professional identity in FNSs and these relationships should be further validated in longitudinal or interventional studies.

This study integrates the resource dependence perspective and the stakeholder perspective to analyze local Chinese suppliers’ environment strategies in response to environmental requirements of different types of customers. With a sample of 1,215 local Chinese manufacturing suppliers, we examine the impact of export intensity and environmental requirements of multinational enterprises on local Chinese suppliers’ environment strategies. The results show that local Chinese suppliers with high levels of export intensity are more likely to adopt positive environment strategies to reduce environmental risks. In addition, local Chinese suppliers respond actively to environmental requirements of MNE customers but not to those of local customers. The linkage between MNE customers’ environmental requirements and local Chinese suppliers’ environment strategies remains significant, even after we control for the impact of export intensity. Implications of the findings conclude the article.