If you are a 'westerner' in china they would certainly go back 100 years to dole out their form of 'justice'.

In any event, I would love to hear some of the facts and holdings of those Chinese cases involving western businesses that were short-sighted on principles of equity, if you can reveal them without violating any ethical norms (and I can't how you would be if they are settled, public decisions). It sounds a bit like you are using very nice, lofty words to describe something that isn't really all that nice, either from the standpoint of "justice" and "equity" or from the standpoint of a business that wants to be able to rely on the law. Did these companies know they were doing something corrupt or dishonest, although technically within the bounds of the law? Perhaps those companies thought they were on the right side of both law and equity, just like the many people that had to pay for injuries that the court knew they had no hand in causing. I also don't see how this type of judgment is beneficial with regard to "harmony" or "social stability," inasmuch as it imposes liability for one person's injury on half a building's worth of innocent people. Even split up among 60 people, assuming they are of average wealth, that's an entire month's wages...Seems wrong to me. Perhaps the state should be paying for these types of injuries?

"Most important, the philosopher-statesmen who have been traditionally associated with so-called legalist (fajia) thinking appear to have adopted certain basic principles of military organization and law and applied them to the civilian population as a whole. This had a most profound effect on Chinese social formation and on Chinese law throughout the entire later imperial period. Specifically, Wei Yang, the Lord Shang of the state of Qin in the mid-fourth century BCE, successfully persuaded Duke Xiao to reform the laws of the state of Qin on military lines, and this reform laid the foundation for Qin's eventual conquest of all its rivals in the following century and for the First Emperor to establish the imperial system in 221 BCE. The latter story is too well known to be recounted here, but a brief review of Lord Shang's reforms is appropriate. First, he organized the entire population under Qin control into household groups of five, and possibly ten, and then on up into larger units, each level legally responsible for the behavior of its members under the "mutual responsibility" (lianzuo) system. In the Qin army, squads of five men and platoons of ten were drawn from these household units, so that one man from each of a group of five households served in the five-man unit in the army. This ensured that men who served in the army would know each other intimately, would probably also be related to each other by blood and/or marriage, and would therefore be prepared to fight to the death to save the other members of their unit. The hierarchical organization of the civilian population as a whole mirrored that of the army. At each level of both institutions, officers or officials were given the authority by the state to manage their unit and were held legally responsible for their underlings' performance. Thus, through the establishment of this order, the state was able to control and manipulate all the members of the society, penetrating right to the heart of the family and rupturing its internal solidarity. The loyalty and solidarity of every member of society were turned toward the Qin state.

Second, under the system of mutual responsibility, in civil life members of the five-man households, led by a group head, were responsible for each other's behavior and were obliged to denounce a fellow member's crime; otherwise, they would be held equally responsible for the crime. In the military, the squad members were responsible for each other's safety. If one man were killed, all the other members would be killed by the commanding officer unless they managed to kill an enemy and present his head to recompense the loss of one of their own. In both civil and military spheres, the language of the law of mutual responsibility indicates that those to the left and right and front and rear were held responsible for an individual's behavior. Such spatial identification was obviously much more readily conceivable in a military unit marching in a group than in the civilian sphere, where--because of the nature of geography and topography--the ideal spatial relations between households would have been much more difficult to delineate. This is one of the reasons why I believe that the system of mutual responsibility was taken from the military sphere and applied to the civilian. This system of mutual responsibility was applied in imperial times. After the Han, it was reveived in the so-called baojia system of family responsibility and mutual protection by the Northern Song statesman Wang Anshi (10212-1086), and in the Ming, from whom the Tokugawa shoguns borrowed it for Japan in the seventeenth century. It obviously also has its counterpart in contemporary China, having been revived after 1949."

If individuals are understood as the sum of their social networks, such a practice easily can become normative and becomes understood that everyone is responsible for everyone in their immediate network, including their neighbors. This creates a useful layer of social control in that individuals have incentives to regulate their family, friends, and neighbors as their problems automatically become your problems.

The main issue I see is that this effect is taking place in a modernizing society where individual ties become progressively more atomized. In a village, or any other traditional setting, everyone knows everyone and the person whose fork caused the brain damage of the street hawker would easily be exposed for fear of punishment. In a modern apartment building, on the other hand, I'd be surprised if you had a casual acquaintance with everyone on the same floor.

But courts, and the system generally, will not always come out this way. There was an identical case in Chongqing a few years ago: the plaintiff was struck in the head by a flowerpot that fell from an apartment building. At the first trial, all the households with windows facing that street were held liable, with the exception of a few who could show they had installed protective netting under their windows. But at the appeal, the Chongqing Intermediate Court ordered a retrial. At the retrial, the plaintiff lost for lack of evidence. He appealed, but the proceedings were suspended when he failed to show up. I don't know what happened to the case after that.

There's actually a statute that's partially on point: Art. 126 of the General Principles of Civil Law, which says, "When falling objects from a building cause harm to others, all of the building’s owners or managers should bear civil liability, unless they can prove that they are not at fault." Thus, there's arguably a legal basis for the judgment in the case you've reported entirely apart from questions of equity.

You're exaggerating that lawyers and companies from America and Europe assume that the courts will always rule on technicalities. Some do, but they're stupid. Unless the law is extremely clear, a judge will always have a lot of leeway to do the "right thing". Even if the law appears clear they may still try to find a way around it.

Finally, how is the case you described a case of "justice" winning out against legal technicalities as you imply? Surely it's a case of gross injustice as 47 households have to contribute towards the negligence of 1 other.

Adam makes some good points in general.

I think what you mean to point out is that Chinese courts are more likely to take a "might as well" approach to the law than are Western courts. Fair interpretation?

As Raj pointed it is never a good idea to not consider the law when handing down judgements. Chinese have a different concept of law simply because the whole idea of "Rule of Law" is NOT chinese at all. The law is the law, and whether or not the law is fair should be determined by the law as it is written. "Doing the right thing" may sound good, but it opens up pandora's box to a whole host of issues by opening the door to such things as corruption, discrimination, amoung many others.

I remember reading a case about a women who was assaulted by her husband (who in addition to severly beating her had poured gasoline on her head and lit her on fire) because she came home late from work. The judge in the case ruled the husband was NOT guilty of assault because he had "good reasons" for beating her for being home late from work. Now it was clearly a textbook case of assault, but because the judge was more interested in "preserving social harmony" and "doing the right thing", he got away with it.

It doesn't matter that it is different, it is still backwards and for the reasons i just decribed the wrong approach.