Activist Lawyers in Post-Tiananmen China

Abstract

What do the activities of twenty‐first‐century Chinese lawyers tell us about the origins and prospects of legal activism under authoritarianism? This essay fits China's Human Rights Lawyers (2014) into an emerging literature on authoritarian legality. The book offers an insider view of a circle of lawyers interested in using China's newly accessible courts as a platform for social activism. It highlights the difficulty of rights lawyers’ day‐to‐day work against the backdrop of the Chinese state's long‐term experiment in how to harness the power of law without ceding political control.

“When They Come for You”: Legal Mobilization in New Authoritarian Russia

“…Another group of scholars, have looked at the invisible everyday work and survival strategies of lawyers in authoritarian regimes. Studies examine how Chinese defense lawyers ( Weiqan lawyers) and environmental lawyers protect clients and cope with coercion under the Communist regime (Michelson ; Nesossi ; Liu and Halliday ; Pils ; Stern ; Stern ). Liu and Halliday's study (2011: 833–34), on the coping practices and motivation of Chinese criminal defense lawyers, finds that these lawyers’ relation to the state and civil society depends on their political embeddedness and attitude toward political liberalism.…”

“…Studying lawyers in (new and old) authoritarian regimes is valuable for several reasons. Stern () argues that lawyers are not only worthy of attention if they achieve visible results in authoritarian regimes. She argues that lawyers act as vanguard: the gradual accumulation of small victories in court shapes larger transformations in society (Stern : 9–10).…”

“…Second, studying the lawyers working closely against state repression gives us the opportunity to examine how the Russian state uses law as a tool of coercion. According to Stern (: 244), “[these lawyers’] struggles tell us a great deal about the architecture of state power.”…”

Exploring frontline work in China

“…In this formalized and idealized sense, ‘the institutional apparatus of public administration is designed to confine and channel frontline decision making to secure equal treatment to the extent possible’ (p. 4). With Western democracies' notion of the rule of law barely having a toehold in the PRC (Fu and Cullen ; Liu and Halliday ; Stern and Hassid ; Fu ; Stern ), we engage in institutional analysis of rule abidance as fidelity to one‐party, autocratic rule. We draw survey data on Chengguan, which is an auxiliary police force in the PRC.…”

The Ecology of Activism: Professional Mobilization as a Spatial Process

“…And what led to the so‐called “709 Crackdown” in July 2015? Given the consecutive repressions of feminists, activist lawyers, labor NGOs, and house churches within a year, it is tempting to conclude that the crackdown signaled the rise of the “Chinese security state” (Wang and Minzner ) and a repressive turn in its policies toward the legal profession and civil society (Biddulph ; Pils ; Stern ). Nevertheless, we argue that, in addition to this notable shift in state policies, there is also a spatial and processual logic to Chinese lawyers’ political activism, an alternative narrative that explains both their rising collective action and the government crackdown in 2015.…”