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On 3 July 2017, 367 judges of the Chinese Supreme People's Court (SPC) took the judicial oath and were reconfirmed as “quota judges” (yuan'e faguan 员额法官).1 That ceremony marked the end of a process of what is officially referred to as judge quota reform in the Chinese judiciary. The quota reform (yuan'ezhi gaige 员额制改革) was implemented between 2014 and 2017 and aimed to downsize the Chinese judiciary according to a formula determined by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The reform required all judges in China, regardless of seniority and rank, to re-apply for judgeship; only a percentage of them would requalify after a series of assessments to be re-appointed as judges. Literally, the party-state suspended the entire judiciary and then made new appointments according to a set of provincial criteria. Following the reform, 120,138 judges of the previously 211,990-strong judiciary were reconfirmed, effectively disqualifying about 90,000 judges in a short space of time.2
The SPC had planned for quota reform since 1998 when it launched its first five-year judicial reforms. The ambition is to select the better-qualified judges from among the existing large pool of judges, and to give them the resources, power and autonomy to render justice. A perceived structural problem of adjudication in China concerned the fact that judges who actually tried cases were not allowed to make decisions. Instead, as a matter of routine, judges only prepared draft decisions for their respective leaders in the judicial bureaucracy to vet and endorse. That administrative capture of judicial power was seen as a fundamental structural defect that constrained the courts and judges from realizing their full potential. A guiding principle of quota reform is to select better-qualified judges and let the judges judge while holding them accountable for their decisions. The aim is for a court to make binding, collective decisions in far fewer categories of cases, and for judges to have significantly more space to make decisions on their own, leading to the rise of individualized judging.
The recent round of reform initiated an unprecedented degree of structural change, with the clear intention to enhance the decision-making powers of individual judges, the financial autonomy and capacity of the courts, judicial transparency, rule-based decision-making and, above all, the trial-centric judicial...