Conclusion

This book examines how the law, political concerns, and social factors jointly shape China’s politicized medical dispute resolution process. This concluding chapter revisits how patients’, mediators’, and doctors’ lives are connected through medical dispute resolution. It concludes and summarizes the key findings of the previous chapters, their theoretical implications, and the book’s limitations. The politicization of medical dispute resolution involves the politicization of issues, institutions, and the dispute resolution process and its outcomes. By doing so, it discourages potential collective actions and shifts disputants’ focus from rights- and law-related concerns to monetary claims. This chapter suggests that the politicization of social dispute resolution may maintain social stability but does so at the longer-term cost of commercializing patient-doctor relations, eroding social trust, and endangering the foundation of the rule of law.