Many people today are accustomed to viewing the world through a binary lens—left or right, black or white, this or that. For example, when categorizing people, they often divide them into liberal arts students and science students. The typical stereotype of liberal arts students is that they lack logical thinking.

The Binary Nesting Method

The binary method, as a simple worldview, is sufficient for most ordinary people. After all, life is hard, and there really isn’t much time to study how the real world actually works.

Therefore, many people continue to nest binaries on top of the binary method. For example, after dividing people into liberal arts students and science students, they further apply binary conditions such as whether they understand logic, believe in science, or are objective enough.

This has led to a peculiar phenomenon on the Chinese internet, where some people stereotypically believe that liberal arts students don’t understand logic, don’t believe in science, and lack objectivity.

Conspiracy Theories

Regarding the issue of liberal arts not emphasizing logic, there is a common conspiracy theory. It claims that an invisible hand is manipulating China’s education system, deliberately removing logic from the humanities and social sciences. The theory suggests that if the humanities and social sciences were to master logic, it would threaten the existence of this invisible hand.

I don’t know if those who believe in this conspiracy theory have actually studied Marxist philosophy. In China’s liberal arts education, Marxist philosophy is undoubtedly one of the most important subjects. Within Marxist philosophy, including the subsequent ideological and political education, causal relationships, the theory of contradictions, the theory of practice, systematic principles, objective principles, and the principles of development and change are all fundamental tools, each imbued with the methodology of logic.

The Lack of Logic is a Natural Choice for the People Following the Theory of Practice

The process of logical deduction is quite challenging for ordinary people. For example, reasoning in judicial cases requires a comprehensive understanding of the case and lengthy logical deductions to reach a verdict. But ordinary people don’t have the time for that; they want straightforward results.

We know that there are two types of justice in the judiciary: procedural justice and outcome justice. Outcome justice is intuitive and easy for the people to understand. But procedural justice is complex; even legal professionals often struggle with it, let alone ordinary people.

Because procedural justice is so complex, there is a lot of room for manipulation. Coupled with a pile of messy code, it often leads to unexpected issues, making it even harder for the people to trust.

Generally, there are four areas in judicial procedures that are prone to problems: 1) surprising evidence recognition, 2) bizarre application of legal rules, 3) inexplicable legal principles, and 4) the use of free evaluation of evidence or discretionary power. To achieve self-consistency in the logical deduction process for these four problematic areas, one must have sufficient confidence in “procedural justice.”

1. Evidence Recognition In a previous blog post How to View the Incident of a Judge Being Murdered, I mentioned: For ordinary Chinese people, the fairness of the law lies in its certainty. A clear crime corresponds to a clear sentence, and a clear loss corresponds to a clear compensation amount. Anyone who breaks this rule undermines the authority of the law. However, in traffic accident compensation cases, due to the parties' ability to provide evidence, a clear loss result often does not correspond to a definite compensation amount, leading to significant fluctuations. And these fluctuations usually follow the same pattern: downward. Evidence has a certain opportunistic and class-based nature. For those with higher social status or those who are cunning, obtaining favorable evidence is usually easy. For example, in a marriage, if one party deliberately creates evidence to seize the spouse’s property, the other party is likely to suffer in silence. In reality, many such cases end with the evidence-disadvantaged party losing, and in most cases, the losing party simply accepts the outcome. But this doesn’t mean that the people internally approve of such practices. Once they find a suitable outlet, it can lead to a massive backlash.

2. Legal Rules In China, the law is a very broad concept. In addition to the formal laws enacted by the National People’s Congress, there are countless judicial interpretations, administrative regulations, government rules, and local legislations. Even many frontline legal practitioners are confused. Especially in certain areas of departmental law, some units may even use internal documents that have never been publicly disclosed as legal bases, sometimes not even showing them to judges. The explicit rules are already overwhelming, and there are countless “unwritten rules,” making it impossible for ordinary people to navigate. In such a situation, even selective application of the law by courts is not surprising. For example, when ordinary people go to village committees for a stamp and are given a hard time, some may resort to forging a stamp. Some courts, considering the village committee’s status in the Constitution as a state organ, treat this as the crime of forging official seals; others, based on institutional management documents, treat it as the crime of forging institutional seals; some, based on local documents, treat it as the crime of forging seals of people’s organizations; some consider it a minor offense punishable by a few days of detention; and others only impose a fine.

3. Legal Principles In China’s legal system, most mandatory legal rules are followed by a flexible catch-all clause, meaning there are always exceptions. As for who can benefit from these exceptions, that’s a big question. In recent years, I have been involved in two criminal cases handled using catch-all clauses, both of which met the elements of the crime but were not prosecuted. For example, one case involved hundreds of people fraudulently claiming unemployment insurance. According to the law, only those actively laid off by their companies are eligible for unemployment insurance, but these people were forced to resign by their companies and then, under the inducement of intermediaries, forged documents to claim insurance. If only legal rules were applied, these hundreds of people would clearly be guilty of fraud. But due to the existence of legal principles, such socially harmless behavior can also be considered non-criminal, which is the fuzzy area of the law.

4. Free Evaluation of Evidence The judge’s discretionary power doesn’t need much explanation here. The report of the Third Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee proposed that the core of judicial reform in the coming years is how to constrain judicial power.

Improve the mechanisms for fair law enforcement and justice. Improve the mechanisms where supervisory organs, public security organs, procuratorial organs, judicial organs, and judicial administrative organs perform their respective duties, and where supervisory power, investigative power, prosecutorial power, adjudicative power, and enforcement power coordinate and constrain each other, ensuring that all links and the entire process of law enforcement and justice operate under effective supervision and constraints. Deepen the reform of separating adjudicative and enforcement powers, improve the national enforcement system, and strengthen the supervision of enforcement activities by parties, procuratorial organs, and the public. Improve the legal relief and protection system, and improve the state compensation system. Deepen and standardize judicial openness, implement and improve the judicial responsibility system. Standardize the establishment of specialized courts. Deepen the reform of hierarchical jurisdiction, centralized jurisdiction, and cross-regional jurisdiction of administrative cases. Build a collaborative and efficient police mechanism, promote the reform of local public security organs’ institutional and staffing management, and continue to promote the reform of the management system of civil aviation public security and customs anti-smuggling departments. Standardize the management system of auxiliary police personnel. Adhere to the correct view of human rights, strengthen the protection of human rights in law enforcement and justice, improve the mechanisms for pre-review, in-process supervision, and post-correction, improve the system of compulsory measures involving personal rights and measures such as sealing, seizure, and freezing, and legally investigate and deal with crimes such as abuse of power for personal gain, illegal detention, and extortion of confessions through torture. Promote full coverage of legal defense in criminal cases. Establish a system for sealing minor criminal records.

The Roughness of the Humanities and Social Sciences

Chinese people may not know the existence of logic, nor do they want to understand the process of judicial adjudication, nor do they trust so-called procedural justice, because they know that only practice is the sole criterion for testing truth, and outcome justice is the most important.

In the field of humanities and social sciences, since the research objects are mainly human thoughts and behaviors, there is a significant difference from the natural sciences, where logical deduction of a theorem or calculation of data leaves no room for error, and the results are highly probable and repeatable.

But for the study of human thoughts and behaviors, it is difficult to achieve such precision. More often, only simple causal relationships and primary and secondary contradictions can be used for research, applying a relatively rough logic to quickly arrive at an approximate conclusion.

For example, no matter who becomes the U.S. President, whether male or female, black or white, most Chinese people would not see much difference, given the primary contradiction between China and the U.S.

It is based on this rough logic that, despite the many uncertainties in China’s judiciary, it remains the most ideal solution for resolving disputes.

After all, from the perspective of maintaining peace, in reality, courts achieve outcome justice in over 99% of cases, and the number of people truly dissatisfied with the verdicts is extremely small.

Unfortunately, human behavior is naturally prone to bugs.

A typical example is that if a war-mongering U.S. President announces the bombing of Iraq and the arrest of a cat, most American people would probably be more concerned about saving the cat than saving Iraq, because common sense tells them that the cat is definitely innocent, but Iraq is harder to judge.

Bugs are an eternal problem in the humanities and social sciences, whether it’s the less than 1% of potentially unjust cases, the unconventional Trump, or the aforementioned cat, all are unexpected factors, similar to outliers in statistics.

And these bugs naturally attract human attention, becoming the eternal protagonists in the court of public opinion.

To solve these bugs, in the judicial field, for example, a bunch of ambiguous legal principles are inserted, a bunch of catch-all clauses to prevent accidents are set, a bunch of legal interpretations outside the law are created, and judges are given a certain amount of discretionary power.

But just like an operating system, the more fuzzy logic there is, the more the system drags. After running through layer after layer of messy code, no one knows what bizarre result will finally emerge.

Ultimately, this leads the people to ignore the process and only focus on the outcome.

Outcome Justice

When I was young, having received a systematic legal education, I once firmly believed that procedural justice was more important than outcome justice. This imported Western concept, by comparison, does have its strengths in logic, appears more perfect, and has strong vitality in the Western real world.

But after working in the legal field for so many years, I have to admit that the masses are indeed wise. Outcome justice is an inevitable choice based on social practice.

I won’t delve into the most popular judicial cases online here, but instead talk about the recent hot topic of three vocational school students becoming deputy town heads in Wan’an County, Jiangxi.

The Wan’an Vocational School Students Incident

In the Wan’an vocational school students incident, there are only two logical deduction processes, which, compared to the multiple layers of fuzzy logic that may exist in judicial procedures, is already a very ideal model.

1. Five Categories of Personnel The five categories of personnel policy was originally a very good policy reflecting the flexibility of the government in selecting and appointing personnel. After all, among contemporary university students, few are willing to stay in townships for a lifetime, while local cadres without civil service positions but who have long stayed at the grassroots level also want some hope. Thus, the practice of selecting one person from township cadres every five years to join the township leadership team was born.

2. Targeted Training Targeted training was widely practiced before 2010 and still exists in some remote and impoverished areas. In places like Wan’an, before 2010, it might have been hard to find a single full-time undergraduate in a town government, so lowering the educational requirement to vocational school for targeted training of grassroots cadres was normal. Generally, these vocationally trained cadres were likely to stay at the grassroots level as cogs for life. In practice, some targeted training cadres I’ve encountered were mostly like this.

But the strange thing is that these two policies were combined in the case of three specific individuals. Through two logical deductions, they became a hot topic of public opinion: three vocationally trained female vocational school students (with in-service college degrees) became deputy town heads.

This result of reasonable logical deduction, in a Western society where people generally believe in procedural justice, might be a very ordinary thing. Not to mention two layers of deduction, even four or five layers, people might not see any problem.

But can Chinese people accept this? Who can be fooled by such monkey tricks?