Restorative Justice and Responsive Regulation in a Chinese Context

The University of Chicago Center in Beijing
20th floor, Culture Plaza
No. 59A Zhong Guan Cun Street
Haidian District Beijing 100872

Professor John Braithwaite
Australian National University
Co-Sponsored with Peking University Law School

Responsive regulation is about learning how to fail fast, learn fast and adapt fast in business regulation. This presentation laid out how to adapt fast in a Chinese regulatory context. Responsive regulation is about responsiveness to environmental circumstances, for example, how regulated businesses respond to regulators.  Professor Braithwaite focused on the responsive regulatory pyramid during his presentation. One of the strategies in the pyramid is restorative justice, which focuses on the ideas of relational and harmonious justice, but with contestation. It is about the idea that “because injustice hurts, justice should heal”. China has recently committed to growing restorative justice.

John Braithwaite is a Distinguished Professor and Founder of RegNet (the Regulatory Institutions Network) at the Australian National University. Since 2004 he has led a 25-year comparative project called Peacebuilding Compared (most recent book: Networked Governance of Freedom and Tyranny (2012, with Hilary Charlesworth and Aderito Soares). He also works on business regulation and the crime problem. His best known research is on the ideas of responsive regulation (for which the most recent book is Regulatory Capitalism: How it works, ideas for making it work better (2008)) and restorative justice (most useful book, Restorative Justice and Responsive Regulation (2002)). Reintegrative shaming has also been an important focus (see Eliza Ahmed, Nathan Harris, John Braithwaite and Valerie Braithwaite (2001) Shame Management through Reintegration). John Braithwaite has been active in the peace movement, the politics of development, the social movement for restorative justice, the labour movement and the consumer movement, around these and other ideas for 50 years in Australia and internationally.