School-Based Restorative Justice for Student Conflicts in China: Theoretical Logic and Local Adaptation

Conflicts are an everyday reality in the school environment. Student conflicts can escalate into bullying, violence, and injury disputes when schools rely solely on incident-focused or punitive responses. This conceptual, normative article examines how restorative justice might complement, rather than replace, disciplinary accountability in Chinese schools. Drawing on relational justice, behavioural science accounts of student conflict, international school-based restorative practice, and Chinese legal and policy materials, it advances three propositions. First, a relational account locates conflict in disrupted interpersonal and institutional relationships and directs attention to harm, needs, responsibility, and repair. Student conflict intervention should focus on more educational and relationship-restorative response pathways. Second, international evidence suggests that restorative approaches may support social–emotional learning, conflict-management skills, and school relationships; however, outcomes vary with programme quality, institutional support, school culture, and cultural context. Third, while the introduction of restorative justice into Chinese campuses appears to enjoy a degree of foundational compatibility with traditional cultural resources and the structural characteristics of the school environment, it also confronts challenges of conceptual adaptation and institutional integration that warrant careful scholarly attention. The article therefore proposes a layered model combining universal preventive education and proportionate restorative interventions. Restorative justice should be treated as a cautiously adapted supplementary framework whose feasibility and effects in Chinese schools require local empirical evaluation.