People’s mediators in Guangxi help promote social harmony, border stability

Now in his 60s, Wu Runsun, a senior people's mediator in Yulin, South China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, still handles more than a hundred traffic accident-related disputes, which involve a total of over ten million yuan ($1.42 million), each year.

His excellence in addressing such disputes earned him the respect of local traffic police officers. "Some of the disputes that we failed to settle are readily solved when Wu stepped in," said one officer.

As outstanding as Wu is, another people's mediator by the name of Mo Honglin, head of a county-level judicial authority in Nanning, capital of Guangxi, shines even more brightly.

During his over-two-decade-long career as a mediator, Mo never saw any of the civil disputes settled by him reemerge or degenerate into a criminal case. With that achievement, Mo was granted the title of the most popular people's mediator in China in 2018.

Wu and Mo are just two of the 110,000 people's mediators in Guangxi, who mediate a total of 270,000 disputes each year, 92 percent of which are successfully resolved.

By constantly improving the mediation work, judicial authorities at all levels in Guangxi are striving to improve people's sense of gain, happiness, security and satisfaction.

So far Guangxi has established a five-level public legal service platform which provides people with such services as mediation and law popularization.

Meanwhile, with special mediation committees for disputes in a wide range of areas like medical services, insurance, marriage and family and business chambers also been set up, a diversified and across-the-board mediation system has taken shape.

People's mediation also plays a critical role in solving disputes in border and adjacent areas as Guangxi borders Vietnam and is adjacent to four other Chinese provinces.

"Mediators handling foreign-related disputes also take on the work of law popularization. They educate peoples on both sides of the border during the mediation process," said Zhou Meichu, head of a mediation committee responsible for mediating disputes in the largest trade market along the border between China and Vietnam in Puzhai, Guangxi.

So far, mediators in Guangxi have settled 813 foreign-related disputes, 73.6 percent of which involved labor, contractual or marital issues.

Data shows that today there are over 600 people's mediators working in China-Vietnam border areas for foreign-related disputes and more than 1,100 in adjacent areas. Together, they raised the proportion of timely solved disputes to 91.58 percent by 2018, an increase of 7 percent from 2016. By the second quarter of 2019, that rate had climbed to 92.28 percent.

A people's mediator conducts mediation at the people's mediation committee in Puzhai, Guangxi. (Photo/Legal Daily)