Domestic Violence

Imagine this scenario: One day, you and your partner have a physical altercation, prompting you to call the police for help. They take you to the police station but inform you that your injuries are too minor to warrant formal actions and suggest you reconcile through mediation. However, you refuse. Then, in an unexpected turn of events, the officers ask you to call your parents or adult children. How would you react in such a situation?

Instances like this happen daily in China’s twelve thousand urban police stations. The practice is commonly known as police mediation. My upcoming book When Law Says Little: China’s Morality-based Police Mediation in Domestic Violence Incidents (Oxford University Press, under contract) demystifies scenarios like this. When Law Says Little provides a constructivist grounded theory analysis of my 18-month ethnographic data collected in Northeast China, 57 hour-long police documentaries, and historiographic work from the 1950s to the present. 

This book examines how frontline officers in China respond to non-criminal domestic violence cases not through legal sanctions but through moral persuasion, informal mediation, and family-based reconciliation. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic, media, and historical research, I demonstrate that this mode of intervention is not merely a product of legal ambiguity or institutional neglect, but a deliberate form of governance that leverages interpersonal obligations, gendered expectations, and cultural values to manage conflict. To analyze this system, I develop a tripartite transnational feminist framework that foregrounds the intersecting roles of (a) preventive and neoliberal governance, (b) familism and intergenerational responsibility, and (c) socially embedded gender norms. This framework moves beyond gender-as-variable approaches to highlight how moral coercion is legitimized and normalized in ways that often obscure victims’ agency and constrain police action. By situating Chinese domestic violence police mediation within broader debates on state power, symbolic violence, and feminist theory, this book argues for a context-sensitive, relational approach to understanding how justice is defined and negotiated under authoritarian conditions. 

Using a transnational feminist framework, my book challenges the traditional notion of “domestic” in domestic violence by situating it within China’s social and political landscape. Additionally, it contributes to ongoing debates between abolitionist and carceral feminists by proposing an alternative approach to addressing domestic violence. It also bridges the feminist and family violence perspectives by offering an inclusive framework that recognizes the violent and victimized experiences of different genders.

This research has been supported by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Law and Society Association, and multiple grants from Grinnell College and the Graduate College of the University of Illinois, and other entities.