[People News] The number of court judgments published on China’s online judicial database in recent years has declined significantly, drawing attention from legal professionals who worry that judicial transparency is continuing to shrink. Lawyers who have long relied on the platform say that when searching for cases from 2025, they found a dramatic reduction in publicly available decisions. Many search results consisted only of rulings to withdraw cases or very short judgments, with full reasoning and value for reference in similar cases clearly diminished.

According to a report by Radio Free Asia, many legal professionals in mainland China have recently been surprised by the change. The China Judgments Online website, once regarded as a core platform for judicial transparency, now appears to be noticeably weakened in function. On Feb. 6, an overseas X (formerly Twitter) account known as “Teacher Li Is Not Your Teacher” posted that recent searches for similar cases on the site returned “pitifully few” precedents from 2025, mostly withdrawal rulings or brief decisions of only a few hundred words.

The post noted that the website had once been positioned as part of a “judicial sunshine project,” but now shows a pattern of “the search portal still exists, but the content keeps shrinking.” This shift is not limited to the experience of a single user; legal practitioners have widely observed the trend in recent years.

Mr. Liu, a rights-defense lawyer in Guangdong, said the continued drop in publicly available judgments reflects a changing attitude within the mainland judicial system toward transparency. He told the station: “In its early days, the judgments website was meant to be an important window for judicial openness. The idea was to lay out the reasoning behind decisions so outsiders could judge whether they were reasonable, and so lawyers could compare similar cases when representing clients. Now many judgments are just a few lines long. We simply can’t see how the court reached its decision.”

Marked Decline in Searchable Judgments

Online commentators have noted that since the site launched in 2013, the number of published judgments had once risen year by year. In 2019, nearly 20 million documents were made public; in 2020, about 18 million; and in 2021, still more than 16 million. But by 2024 and 2025, the number reportedly dropped sharply to around 7.5 million per year, a decline that has drawn the legal community’s attention.

Mr. Zhou, a rights lawyer in Beijing, said the site previously played an important role in making the workings of the courts visible to society and provided a degree of external constraint on judicial behavior. He told reporters: “The problem now isn’t just that there are fewer documents. The content that is published is getting more and more ‘hollow.’ Many cases only disclose the conclusion, without showing how the facts were determined or how the law was applied. Outsiders simply cannot judge whether a ruling is reasonable.”

The station previously reported that China Judgments Online officially went live on July 1, 2013, and was seen as a major step in the disclosure of judicial information. At the time, many legal professionals did not anticipate that more than a decade later, this so-called “window for judicial openness” would gradually tighten. Official data show that as of Nov. 28, 2023, the site had recorded over 100 billion visits and had cumulatively published more than 143 million judgment documents.

However, legal scholars have noted that from 2024 to 2025, the number of judgments published annually dropped significantly to around 7.5 million, a stark contrast with earlier peak periods.

Scholars: Reduced Transparency Weakens External Oversight

Mr. Song, a retired lecturer at Lanzhou University Law School, said: “Putting judgments online was originally meant to allow judges’ fact-finding, legal reasoning, and application of law to be examined by peers and by society. That kind of pressure itself acts as a constraint. If fewer and fewer documents are made public, external oversight will certainly weaken as well.”

As for the reasons behind the sharp decline, many in China’s legal community believe it is not due to a single factor. Song said that in a system where the judiciary lacks independence and rulings are highly responsive to political security and stability concerns, judicial transparency itself carries inherent risks.

He told reporters: “Once full reasoning is made public, how power is exercised, how discretion is used, and what contradictions exist within the system all become visible to the public. That fundamentally conflicts with the government’s long-term pursuit of ‘controllability’ and the reduction of uncertainty.”

Retreat in Judicial Openness, Shrinking Space for Independence

Song added: “In recent years, some of my students have repeatedly discussed judicial independence with me. I can only tell them that the current judicial environment is no longer as open as it was in the early period of reform and opening up.”

Recently, judicial documents uploaded by courts in various regions have also begun to omit the names of judges and case numbers, further fueling concerns that judicial transparency is backsliding.

Legal professionals point out that many judicial interpretations in China remain principled and general, while the handling of specific cases still depends heavily on the discretion of local courts and internal operational standards formed within different court systems. In this context, the judgments database has long been regarded as an important window for the outside world to understand differences in judicial standards, enforcement tendencies, and internal practices across courts.

As of now, China’s Supreme People’s Court has not publicly responded to questions about the noticeable drop in the number of published judgments.