Recent attempts by Chinese litigants to seek a collective civil remedy in the Chinese courts against government-controlled Chinese companies for manufacturing allegedly tainted baby formula have met with serious government resistance (see various previous CAB entries summarized here).  It will be interesting to see how a collective products liability lawsuit against an American company will fare by comparison.

China’s government prefers to take administrative action rather than let courts handle politically sensitive cases, according to Ed Lehman, the founder of Chinese law firm Lehman Lee & Xu. . . .  After the government organized compensation and sentenced two dairy company executives to death over the matter, “they think they’ve done what needs to be done,” he says.

The article notes, that despite the Chinese government’s reluctance to allow private remedies through collective action, Chinese law does allow for group lawsuits and there have been cases in which successful group actions have resulted in monetary recoveries.  So far, though, efforts to obtain a private remedy with the China’s Supreme People’s Court in the tainted milk case have met with silence.

The highly unusual intervention is within the court’s power, said Xu Zhiyong, one of the lawyers who submitted it, but added that they held little hope of it succeeding.

The Chinese Government’s official web portal describes the powers of the Supreme People’s Court as including:

Conducting trial of the following cases: first-hearing cases placed with the SPC by laws and regulations and those the SPC deems within its jurisdiction.

Source: Gov.cn (emphasis added).  (I’m by no means a Chinese law expert, but to my untrained eye this appears to say that the court can take any case if it feels like it.)

Efforts to seek collective relief in the Chinese courts reportedly have met repeated resistance from the government.  Immediately after the incident, officials tried to discourage resort to the Courts with the promise of government assistance.  (See this October 1, 2008 ClassActionBlawg entry).  According to Graham-Harrison’s article, parents of children allegedly poisoned were detained when they tried to attend the trial of executives of one of the companies accused of selling the tainted milk.  Graham-Harrison echoes the observations of previous commentators that the ruling Communist party’s influence over the courts has frustrated attempts to use the courts as a means of pursuing collective redress.

The article discusses several reasons why Chinese consumers have been slow to resort to the courts for redress, including that a government promise to provide free health health care for those affected, a societal predisposition to rely on government redress rather than the courts, the historical inability to collect damages for pain and suffering, and efforts by various parts of the government to prevent access to the courts, especially in politically sensitive cases.  While the article notes that the legal climate in China may be changing, pointing to an award of small amounts of noneconomic damages for “moral and spiritual suffering” awards in a recent case against another milk manufacturer, it quotes a prominent Chinese human rights lawyer as predicting that the current system of government compensation will last “for quite a while.”

Other commentators have pointed to the availability of compensation through government programs as a factor in why U.S.-style class action litigation has not yet become prevalent in Europe.  (See this previous ClassActionBlawg article).  Adding to this government safety net a totalitarian government intent on avoiding the perceived social instability that would come from having private injuries redressed through the courts seems to assure that U.S.-style class action and mass tort litigation is a long way away in China.