China has made a continuing effort over the past decade to conduct a judicial reform (Hu, 2007; Jiang, 1997) in order to accommodate its fast-developing market and economy. The judicial reform changes a number of aspects of Chinese litigation practices including the selection of judges, the hearing of cases and the writing of judgments. This research aims at describing, analyzing and explaining some of the ways in which Chinese judges change their discursive construction of civil judgments due to the ongoing judicial reform. A variety of data are used in this research: a medium-sized corpus of Chinese civil judgments, lawyers and judges’ accounts, written laws (statutes) and legal news reports. Analytical results suggest that Chinese civil judgments, although being a highly institutionalized and standardized genre, include a number of discursive instances demonstrating Chinese judges’ context-specific writing variations and their efforts in enhancing the transparency of background litigation practices.
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