China has been promoting judicial digitalization in a big wave in recent years. While the western legal tech market primarily flourishes from the bottom-up, China’s judicial digitalization has been implemented in a predominantly top-down manner, especially in its early stages. By 2013, the significance of judicial digitalization had expanded beyond the pursuit of mere efficiency enhancement. Other multi-dimensional objectives, such as strengthening litigation fairness, promoting access to justice, and enhancing judicial transparency, had been incorporated into political considerations.
In this short paper, I present an overview of how digitalization has transformed the way courts function in China. I will discuss the “three-tier empowerment” of judicial digitalization in China. The first tier involves using technology to streamline the “ancillary adjudicative work” that supports court operations, such as case filing, service, pretrial mediation, trial proceedings, enforcement, case management, and disclosure. The second tier involves using technology to improve the “core adjudicative work” of fact-finding and rule-application, which are the essential tasks for judges to make decisions. The third tier reflects how the Chinese judicial system is using digital transformation as a way to participate in social governance and enhance its political status. In other words, Chinese courts are going beyond their traditional role of adjudication and becoming a part of the larger social and political fabric of China.