On Feb 15, the Supreme People's Court (SPC) held a press conference to brief on the achievements of Chinese courts in developing the one-stop diversified dispute resolution and litigation service system.  

• Remarkable progress made in addressing the sources of disputes

Since the launch of the program at the beginning of 2019, the one-stop service system has experienced leapfrog development. In recent years, the number of social conflicts and disputes brought to the people's courts has been growing at an average annual rate of more than 10 percent. However, through pre-litigation mediation, that number declined in 2020, after 15 years of continuous growth, and again in 2022. The proportion of civil administrative disputes settled through litigation dropped from 90 percent in 2019 to 64 percent in 2022.

The change comes from the building of an online diversified dispute resolution mechanism, established by the SPC, together with 12 central administrative organs and national trade associations. Mediation resources at all levels were pulled together and their roles maximized, creating a new model of online diversified dispute resolution with Chinese characteristics. In 2022, the mechanism participated in the mediation of 1.14 million disputes, up 422.6 percent year on year, with a success rate of 78.9 percent, 15 percentage points higher than in 2021.

By the end of 2022, there were 96,000 mediation organizations and 372,000 mediators working with people's courts, with 38.32 million disputes having been mediated online. The number of successful pre-litigation mediation cases has been growing at an average annual rate of 83 percent since 2019. In 2022, 8.95 million cases were resolved via pre-litigation mediation, a year-on-year increase of 46.6 percent.

• Smart services back "digital justice"

On average, 54,000 disputes were mediated online every working day, 75 cases resolved at the pre-litigation stage every minute, and one out of every 2.2 mediation cases conducted via remote means.

Courts at all levels have striven to digitalize their litigation services as they aim for a higher level of "digital justice". In 2022, the mobile terminal of the "online services of people's courts" provided 10.72 million online case-filing services, a year-on-year increase of 30.6 percent, with an average of 61 cases per minute being filed by the fingertip. The number of  lawyers who used the lawyer service platform to handle litigation matters reached 433,800, covering all litigation lawyers across the country.

Progress has also been made in reform of auxiliary judicial affairs where the affairs are handled by centralized, intelligent and commercial means. In 2022, people's courts delivered 92.64 million judicial documents by electronic means, up 123 percent year on  year. The value of online asset preservation reached 2.66  trillion yuan ($386.32 billion). Through the entrusted appraisal system, the average online appraisal cycle of people's courts was 21 working days in 2022, 31 percent shorter than the traditional court appraisal, saving time and the economic costs for litigants.

• Building a "door-to-door" dispute resolution model

Efforts have also been made to connect people's courts with grassroots governance bodies, in a bid to ensure legal services at the grassroots level with higher efficiency and wider coverage.

In 2022, 9,677 people's courts worked with 75,511 grassroots governance units, including mediation platforms, police stations, judicial offices and village committees, and prevented and resolved 332,100 disputes, 32.57 times the number in 2021.