On Self-help

Based on a field study of an informal debt-collection practice, the dissertation explores self-help, judicial remedy and dispute settlement mechanisms, and puts forward some significant proposals for judicial reform and rule of law. The dissertation insists on methodological pluralism,and tries to bridge the gap between civil procedure and social science. Furthermore, it develops a perspective of "micro-narrative and macro-field",by focusing on China's own issues, advocating interdisciplinary research, from origin to field, from particulars to generalizations, from specific cases to theories, from a mono-thread to multi-perspectives, from litigation to jurisprudence, then ideology, to society.The dissertation falls into ten parts.Chapter 1 is the introduction.Chapter 2 describes the informal debt-collection practice in Southern China, a dispute settlement without court.Chapter 3 analyzes the concept of self-help.Chapter 4 turns back to the informal debt-collection practice, and endeavors to disclose why some people choose self-help.Chapter 5 applies the game theory to reveal the reasons that the debtors are inclined to choose cooperation when the creditors take self-help remedies, in short, why self-help is so effective.Chapter 6 addresses the official policies to informal debt-collection and self-help. There are discrepancies between official representation and practice. As for the informal debt-collection I surveyed, state and society come to a tacit conspiracy, and the state tolerates the existence of self-help to a "proper extent", which is a kind of the art of government that public power attains social control through private individuals' actions.Based on the economic theory of law enforcement, chapter 7 takes the informal debt-collector as private enforcer of law.Chapter 8 discusses the interplay among self-help, judicial remedy and social remedy.Chapter 9 discusses the legitimacy of self-help, tries to achieve social control on self-help through law. Finally, I call on to take self-help seriously, make it function positively, limit and channel its negative functions, and construct a multiple dispute settlement mechanism under which judicial remedy, self-help and social remedy interplay conducively.