This article reads Ma Xiwu’s method not as a timeless symbol of “people-centered justice”, and not as a precursor to judicial mediation in its modern form. Rather, it reads Ma Xiwu’s method as a socially embedded form of adjudication that was shaped by the specificities of the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region in the 1940s. When viewed in that context, the distinctiveness of Ma Xiwu’s method was its combination of circuit adjudication, investigation, local knowledge, public explanation, and mediation. This article will also examine the marriage dispute that eventually became the case of Liu Qiao’er and will demonstrate how Ma Xiwu’s method was used to bring revolutionary justice to rural China. The power of Ma Xiwu’s method was also its limitation. It was a weak form of legal procedure that blurred the line between mediation and adjudication and that rested heavily on political mobilization and managed local consent.
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Huang, L., Ye, H. (2025) Socially Embedded Adjudication in Wartime China: Rethinking Ma Xiwu’s Method of Judging. Journal of Social Development and History, 1(4), 87-92.