Censorship of Court Judgments in the PRC

This blog has previously discussed the issue of "data missingness" in the case of administrative punishment decisions - see "Disappearing Government Records Show Police Ordering People, Companies to Stop Using Foreign VPNs" http://blog.feichangdao.com/2020/11/disappearing-government-records-show.html . This post will cover the "data missingness" that has occurred with respect to court judgments on the "China Judgments Online" database. Volume 22, No. 3 (August 2022) of The China Review included an essay by Chao Xi titled "How the Chinese Judiciary Works: New Insights from Data-Driven Research" ( https://ssrn.com/abstract=4204917 ). According to Chao, Professor and Outstanding Fellow, Associate Dean (Research), and Chair, Corporate Law and Governance Cluster of the Centre for Comparative and Transnational Law at the Faculty of Law, The Chinese University of Hong Kong: One of the most pressing methodological challenges of CJO-based