Michael Ng and Xuanming Pan
The China Review: an Interdisciplinary Journal on Greater China
October 2017, Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 59-86
Abstract: This article provides a corrective to the conventional discourse on legal
development in modern and contemporary China. By mapping the
landscape of nonprofessional legal service provision crossing over
modern and contemporary history, this research proposes a new analytical
framework for understanding lawyering, professionalization, and
access to justice in China. Previous studies present an urban-centric
view and highlight the alternativeness and transitional nature of
nonprofessional legal service providers (who operate primarily in rural
China) vis-à-vis the professionally trained and qualified lawyers (who
serve primarily in urban China). The urban-oriented discourse downplays,
if not ignores, the historical fact that the ordinary people of
China, mostly residing in rural areas, have relied on nonprofessional
legal workers as their mainstream access to justice for centuries, with
demand for their services remaining largely unchanged throughout the
Qing, Republican, Mao, and post-Mao eras despite the attempted monopolization of the legal market by qualified lawyers. This article
therefore argues for a reorientation of the conventional inquiry
concerning the path toward the professionalization of lawyering in
China that is framed in terms of license-based expertise and access.
Rural legal workers, this article further argues, will, and should be
allowed to, continue to meet the legal demand of the broader rural
masses in China, demand that can hardly be met by the socially elite
qualified lawyers practicing in urbanized China and provide, together
with the qualified legal profession, dual-core access to justice in China.
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