Haiyan Lee's A Certain Justice brings together scholarship from numerous fields, including critical legal studies and moral philosophy, and a broad, rich array of cultural sources to give a nuanced and thoughtful portrait of Chinese imaginings of justice. In Chinese political-legal culture, Lee primarily sees justice as “vertical,” split into high justice and low justice (262). She explains that the conventional stereotyping of Chinese political-legal structures as Oriental despotism misunderstands the primacy of high justice—the priorities of a state that claims moral legitimacy—over low justice—the treatment and experiences of individuals. Lee contrasts this with the “horizontal” (262) justice of Euro-American states that prioritize liberal rule of law and “justice as fairness” (8).
Lee uses an extensive and diverse range of literary and cultural sources, ranging from spy novels such as Mai Jia's In the Dark and films such as The Case of Huang Kegong (2014). The majority of the pieces...
