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.

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.

Based on interviews and participant observation, the study identifies five ideal-typical modes of legal consciousness—alienated, skeptical, hesitant, pragmatic, and active—and analyzes their formation in relation to institutional practices, cultural traditions, and everyday experiences. The paper argues that the legitimacy of the People’s Congress system is not derived from procedural mimicry of Western parliamentary models, but from its embeddedness in local networks of trust, ritualized participation, and a distinctive “institutional nexus” that mediates between the state and society. The study contributes to global legal pluralism by offering a decolonized reading of China’s representative institutions.