Minor criminal offenses, many of them cybercrimes, now dominate China’s criminal courts, and nearly every defendant is convicted. Drawing on five months of ethnographic fieldwork in a Chinese basic-level court, this study examines how a conviction-driven criminal process shapes judges’ moral and emotional experience of punishment when they handle minor cybercrime cases. Judges often experience what I call “the will not to punish”: moral and emotional hurdles to punishment arising from sympathy for defendants as a marginalized group and distrust of police and procurators. Yet the mandate to convict requires judges to overcome these hurdles. They do so through two mechanisms, moral counterweighting and moral sheltering, which construct case-specific grounds for punishment and turn “the will not to punish” into “the will to punish.” The study shows how state actors work through moral conflict and how this moral work helps sustain a coercive judiciary.

About the speaker:

Sitao Li is a Laureate Fellow at the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore. He works at the intersection of criminology and the sociology of law, with a focus on criminal courts, penal power, and cybercrime. His research examines judicial work at the nexus of legality, punishment, and political control. His articles have appeared or are forthcoming in the British Journal of Criminology, Law & Society Review, Annual Review of Sociology, The China Quarterly, and China Information. He is completing a book manuscript, The Fragmentation of Judicial Roles. He received the Asian Law & Society Association’s 2023 Graduate Student Article Award and the Canadian Sociological Association’s 2026 Outstanding Graduating Sociology Student Award. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Toronto, a JD from UC Berkeley School of Law, and a BA in Political Science from UC Berkeley.

📅 Date: 20 November 2026

🕑 Time: 2:00pm - 3:30pm

📍 Venue: CJT-9.29

🗣️ Language: English

This seminar is exclusively open to faculty members and research postgraduate (RPg) students in the Department of Sociology.