Calibrated Autonomy: China's 2026 Business Mediation Ordinance and the Reconfiguration of Dispute Resolution

Abstract

This article argues that China's 2026 Business Mediation Ordinance represents neither progress toward rule of law nor retreat from it. I propose instead that we are witnessing something I call “calibrated autonomy”—the strategic construction of spaces for private ordering that remain tethered to Party‐State oversight through multiple institutional linkages. The dominant scholarly frameworks miss this. Matthew Erie sees new legal hubs; Carl Minzner sees a turn against law; Björn Ahl sees judicial institutional strategies. Each captures something real. But none grasps the distinctive logic at work: the Party‐State deliberately creates bounded zones of legal autonomy precisely because such zones serve its interests, while structuring those zones to ensure continued control. This is not rule of law. It is not its absence. It is a third thing—one that challenges us to rethink how we understand legal development under authoritarian conditions. The analysis extends conflict resolution theory by demonstrating that the characteristics Western scholarship treats as universal features of mediation—party autonomy, mediator neutrality, voluntariness—are contingent features of particular institutional arrangements, and it raises practical questions about enforcement of mediated settlements under the Singapore Convention when mediation systems embed state oversight.