China provides a particularly interesting case for academic research, a country that has achieved remarkable progress and in the meantime is facing serious challenges. As a prime example, Chinese regulatory agencies face serious challenges in reducing illicit and damaging behaviour that has been significantly growing in the Chinese society. Against this background, project 4 is a PhD research project that focus on China.

This project endeavours to understand the views of Chinese regulatory actors on how to use law to reduce misconduct and promote compliance in the Chinese society. It has selected some Chinese regulatory actors to focus on, such as Chinese prosecutors as the principal enforcers in the criminal law domain, governors in China’s environmental bureaus and compliance officers in Chinese companies as guardians of compliance in businesses. In order to provide a fair account of Chinese regulatory actors’ own views on reducing misconduct and promoting compliance, this project in its first step will strive to collect data and establish an understanding on what their individual views are. It will employ mixed empirical methods that comprise mainly semi-structured interviews and surveys, to collect the relevant data. It is relevant to note that existing literature has provided a lot of knowledge on how law can shape human and organisational behaviour for enhanced compliance. This knowledge provides solid theoretical grounds for this project, in terms of not only the design of interview and survey questions but also data analysis in the next steps. The researcher will develop the analysis in answering a series of key questions, as follows. To what extent are the views of Chinese regulatory actors aligned or misaligned with knowledge concluded by existing literature? What are the implications of such alignment and misalignment? On one hand, answers to these questions may provide important ideas on how to further improve China’s regulatory practice and optimise the Chinese legal system. On the other hand, the answers will hopefully contribute to the future theoretical development in twofold. First, they will serve as a “reality check” on existing literature, such as to identify which boundaries they (unspokenly) entail. Second, they will add a unique non-Western case, i.e. the Chinese case, to existing theories on the functioning of law to shape behaviour that are predominantly Western.