Most local residents in Shanghai lack necessary knowledge about the law and are unfamiliar with lawsuit filing procedures, a survey on legal literacy indicates.

The Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences conducted the survey, the city's first of its kind.

From April to November last year, 20-plus professional surveyors, aided by subdistrict and neighborhood committees, randomly selected 5,000 residents aged between 15 and 80, including 2,395 males, who were queried in both written form and direct interview.

"We wanted to get a comprehensive understanding of locals' legal literacy, which would help in the city's future development," said Yang Xiong, director of the academy's Institute for Youth Research who led the survey, yesterday.

About 80 percent respondents were married, 24 percent had college or higher education background and 66 percent were non-Communist Party members.

Among them, 33.9 percent said they will avoid going to court, 60.7 percent confessed "they did not very often resist illegal behavior," and only 33.7 percent said they would file a lawsuit when their legal rights are violated.

Tang Xiaotian, a law professor of Shanghai University, commented, "Residents don't have to become experts on law but they should be encouraged to use legal means to protect their legal interests."

According to the survey, 64 percent respondents were not familiar with the process of filing a lawsuit, while another 8.4 percent were totally ignorant of it. Meanwhile, 42.5 percent were not satisfied with their knowledge of law, while 82.7 percent said they were willing to receive more legal training.

Tang attributed locals' limited legal knowledge to the country's average low legal literacy.

"The government should quicken steps to reform the political system, allowing people access to more ways of supervising its operation," he added.

Meanwhile, 49.5 percent respondents believed that corruption in the city's judiciary was slightly less compared to five years ago, and 58.9 percent chose "corruption and bribery" as the biggest crimes in the judiciary. Also, 55.9 percent said the most serious problem in the city's legal system was "existing laws that cannot be enforced fully and well."

(Shanghai Daily November 20, 2003)