China started publishing the universe of court verdicts as part of their legal reform since 2013. This endeavor is widely acknowledged as a cruicial step towards legal transparency, justice, and government accountability. However, starting from 2021, the government seems to be intentionally rolling back the commitment. Not only do we observe a huge dip in the total # of published verdicts, we also observe a considerable number of cases where previous court verdicts have been retracted. Out of the 80 million civil lawsuits published, over 2.5 million are retracted from the official website.
We're interested in understanding this unique phenomenon of legal censorship. Specifically,
Firm-level regression: Did court verdict removal help those firms attract more investment?
More contracts with SOEs
More investments from PEs
Heterogeneity on # of previous cases
Heterogeneity on type of court cases