The Art of Persuasion: Everyday Mediation Practice

This chapter examines the rise of the People’s Mediation in dealing with the rising medical disputes as well as absorbing social grievances. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in people’s mediation, I explained why and how the mediators have addressed social grievances in an efficient manner and achieve political and social goals simultaneously. I find that the mediation process was full of power interactions. Specifically, I summarize a series of mediators’ daily practices and theorize it as politicization, affective and bargaining strategies, which discourage and deter the (potential) collective actions, satisfy the disputants’ psychological demands and provide monetary compensation to settle the case respectively. By doing so, it jointly led to the high mediation success rate. This chapter enhances our understanding of the adaptive role of the People’s Mediation channel from an institutional perspective and contributes to crystalizing the dynamical strategies in the mediation process.