ALSA 2025 meeting

This study examines perceptions of China’s People’s Congress system through 2021 fieldwork (38 citizen and 3 delegate interviews), revealing a paradox in legal consciousness. While citizens broadly affirm the system’s institutional legitimacy, they demonstrate minimal interest in or knowledge of electoral procedures. This disjuncture reflects a contradictory configuration where legal recognition coexists with procedural disengagement.

Citizen respondents, often lacking civic education, validated the system’s functional legitimacy within centralized governance, yet exhibited conceptual ambiguity regarding electoral mechanisms. Grassroots delegates described operational autonomy mediated through bureaucratic channels, not electoral accountability. This bifurcation suggests electoral legitimacy in China is sustained not by participatory processes but by state-authored ethical and developmental narratives. Non-voting rarely signified institutional rejection; instead, legitimacy derives from symbolic alignment with state discourses on virtue and harmony.

Theoretically framed by Unger’s dialectic of legal universality/particularity, the analysis identifies a culturally specific formal equality detached from liberal proceduralism. Here, equality manifests not as active legal agency or procedural awareness but as symbolic recognition of fairness within hierarchical moral orders. Legal consciousness is thus shaped by embedded ethical expectations and state developmentalist discourse, internalized through belief systems. Notions of justice and legitimacy emerge from culturally mediated understandings of moral authority, not direct electoral engagement.

Consequently, "formal equality" in this context—descriptively, not pejoratively—denotes a framework where institutions derive legitimacy from conformity to state virtues (e.g., social harmony, developmental efficacy), not abstract rights or participation. This reconfiguration challenges liberal paradigms, demonstrating how legal consciousness and equality can operate through ethical imaginaries rather than procedural norms.