Ying Xia on Guerrilla Lawyering: Mobile Resistance in China’s Environmental Public Interest Litigation (LSR)

"Guerrilla Lawyering: Mobile Resistance in China’s Environmental Public Interest Litigation"
Ying Xia
Law & Society Review, First View, pp. 1 - 27
Published online: September 2025

Abstract: This study examines the transformation of environmental public interest lawyering in China within an ever-tightening legal order, where activists confront both state suppression and co-optation. Utilizing qualitative methods, including in-depth interviews with 49 environmental lawyers and activists, participant observations, and online ethnography, the research delineates two divergent models of legal mobilization. The conventional model prioritizes compliance with state regulations, employing impact litigation and consensus-building with state institutions to drive incremental environmental reforms, often at the cost of aligning with state priorities. In contrast, guerrilla lawyering emerges as an innovative strategy, leveraging decentralized networks, experimentalist litigation, flexible funding, and diffused media tactics to sustain activism while preserving autonomy. By transforming courts into platforms for generating critical information and exposing systemic vulnerabilities, guerrilla lawyering resists assimilation into state-controlled schemes. This approach not only ensures movement survival amidst repression but also enriches theoretical understandings of legal mobilization under authoritarianism by addressing the understudied risk of co-optation. These findings illuminate the resilience and ingenuity of activists in China’s constrained environmental advocacy landscape and offer a transferable framework for resistance for social movements in other authoritarian contexts, amid the global rise of authoritarian legality.

New Book by Richard Wu et al : The Good Chinese Lawyer: a Student Guide to Law and Ethics (Cambridge University Press)

The Good Chinese Lawyer: a Student Guide to Law and Ethics
Adapted by Adrian Evans, Richard Wu and Xu Shenjian
Cambridge University Press
Published in January 2023

312 pp.

Description: The Good Chinese Lawyer explores the ethical and professional challenges that will confront a law student, and will help them to prepare for life as a lawyer. The book offers principled and pragmatic advice about how to overcome such challenges. It urges readers to examine motives for seeking a career in law, to foster a deep understanding of what it means to be 'good' lawyer, and how to draw on virtue and judgment when difficult choices arise, rather than simply relying on rushed compliance with rules or codes. The Good Chinese Lawyer analyses four important areas of legal ethics – truth and deception, professional secrets, conflicts of interest, and professional competence – and explains the choices that are available when determining a course of moral action. It links theory to practice, and includes many diagrams and scenarios to illustrate ethical concepts and good decision-making.

• Includes a values-identification process, situated in the context of topical scenarios that apply throughout Greater China, relevant to and accessible by law students
• Provides a comparison of relevant legal professional conduct rules applicable to mainland China, Hong Kong SAR and Taiwan
• Utilises easy-to-understand tables that set out the legal ethical principles of major philosophical traditions, matched to those legal professional conduct rules

Hualing Fu on Lawyers for Human Rights Protection: from Legal Aid to Political Lawyering (new book chapter)

"Lawyers for human rights protection: from legal aid to political lawyering"
Fu Hualing
in Sarah Biddulph and Joshua Rosenzweig (eds), Handbook on Human Rights in China (Elgar 2019) 472-492

Abstract: Since its restoration, the legal profession has played an indispensable role in China’s human rights protection. Together with journalists and NGO leaders, lawyers serve as the guardian of human rights in China, and this trinity of forces intimates a strong possibility for the development of human rights in authoritarian regimes. The purpose of this chapter is to identify three distinct types of legal advocacy for human rights in China, explore their internal dynamics, and examine their respective contributions to enhancing human rights protection and the corresponding limits. Theoretically this chapter also aims to explore a possible evolutionary trajectory of human rights lawyering in the authoritarian context which posits three stages, namely the provision of legal aid services for the poor; which is followed by public interest legal advocacy to facilitate structural changes; and finally political lawyering to catalyze potential systemic reforms.

Hualing Fu on Social Organization of Rights: From Rhetoric to Reality (UCLA Pacific Basin Law Journal)

"Social Organization of Rights: From Rhetoric to Reality"
Hualing Fu
UCLA Pacific Basin Law Journal
2019, Volume 36, Issue 1

Abstract: Public interest litigation (PIL) is a form of socio-legal activism. PIL originated in the United States, and spread, through the aggressive promotion of U.S.-centric rule of law, to China, where it has had a significant impact on socio-legal activism since the 1990s. This Article explores both the process through which human rights discourse is translated into practice by activist lawyers and human rights defenders, as well as the circumstances that cause socio-legal mobilization to fail or succeed. This Article examines the collective and sustained endeavour by human rights lawyers and other activists to advocate for the rights of specific communities through a rights complex, composed of activist lawyers, NGO leaders, and citizen journalists, as well as supporters within state institutions, Chinese society, and the international community. This Article looks at the institutionalized manner through which legal cases facilitate socio-legal mobilization to serve the broader objectives of educating citizens, enhancing the capacity of civil society, and making the government more accountable and responsive. The principal argument is that once citizens are endowed with legal rights and institutions are put in place for their implementation, the remaining issue is raising rights-awareness among rights-bearing citizens and generate demand for rights in society and channel those rights to institutions. Lawyers and other rights defenders play an indispensable bridging function in translating rhetoric to practice.

Hualing Fu & Han Zhu on After the July 9 (709) Crackdown: The Future of Human Rights Lawyering (Fordham ILJ)

"After the July 9 (709) Crackdown: The Future of Human Rights Lawyering"
Hualing Fu & Han Zhu (PhD 2016)
Fordham International Law Journal
2018, Volume 41, Issue 5, pp. 1135-1164

Introduction:  Eighteen months after the 709 crackdown on human rights lawyers, a debate took place within China’s human rights lawyers’ communities. It is a brief, yet passionate and provocative debate focusing on some of the fundamental questions about law’s limits in seeking justice and protecting rights in an authoritarian state and the limited role of lawyers in their endeavour. Having grown for about twenty years since the mid-1990s, human rights lawyers have engaged in social-legal activism in wide policy areas including consumer protection, anti-discrimination, rights in the criminal process, and the freedom of religion and speech. The growth of legal rights and their enhanced protection in China in the past two decades are inextricably tied to China’s growing legal profession, especially a small group of lawyers who variously called themselves weiquan lawyers, die-hard lawyers, or human rights lawyers—lawyers who are public interest minded, legal rights-focused, and politically motivated in their battles against arbitrary powers. Yet, those are the lawyers who have received severe crackdown, and the repression has naturally provoked some of them to reflect on the vulnerability of the legal profession in the authoritarian state and the future prospect of socio-legal activism in bringing meaningful changes in society. The debate involved two issues: one specific and the other one general. The specific, pointed question that they have raised is this: is the traditional case-focused and law-centred legal mobilization, moderate or aggressive, still a feasible approach to take to bring structural changes to the political system, incremental or otherwise? In the aftermath of the crackdown, estranged lawyers started to reflect on their past success and failure, to cast doubts about their potential of their own profession in catalysing political transformation, and to express their deeply felt anxiety, frustration, and confusion about law, courts, and human rights lawyering.  A more general question touches on a more sensitive issue relating to the politics of lawyering. For the rights lawyers who have experienced or witnessed the crackdown, the Party has revealed its true nature and whatever hope that lawyers may have on law’s potential to tame the Party must have proven false.  For them, what matters in the Chinese political-legal system is Article 1 of the Constitution that states clearly that China is a democratic dictatorship. The occasional success in a few legal battles, they admit, may have blinded their eyes on the true nature of the Party state. Some of them, they admit, may just have forgotten that, in Svolik’s terms, repression is the “original sin” of authoritarianism. If that were the case, human rights lawyers should step out of the shadow of law, call a spade a spade and confront the Party head-on. Human rights lawyers need to be openly political. Before the 2015 crackdown, China had experienced waves of social-legal activism since the mid-1990s in which right discourses are translated into rights practices. As it happens, human rights lawyers and other activists have been situated at the forefront in the tireless efforts to expanding the sphere of rights and freedom and in constraining the arbitrary exercise of state power.  Together with media, especially social media and domestic Non-governmental organizations (“NGOs”) working in different sectors, human rights lawyers form a strategic “legal complex” in China in protecting legal rights and freedom and in the process hold the Party state accountable to its own legal rhetoric. Supported and sometimes aided by foreign donors, the legal complex used law as an entry point to engage in social-legal activism in shaping public opinions and influencing court decisions. For what they have done in leading and organizing those movements, lawyers and other activists have paid heavy prices and, one may argue, the prices that they pay are precisely indicative of their significance and impact. During the crackdown, leading human rights lawyers were placed under lengthy and secretive detention; many were humiliated and forced to confess their sins in state controlled or arranged media outlets, some were sentenced to lengthy imprisonment terms for subverting state power, and all were placed under tight control. The post-crackdown era also witnessed enhanced professional regulation by the government regulators—the Ministry of Justice (“MoJ”) and its provincial and local counterparts. With the appointment of Fu Zhenghua as the Minister of Justice, the Party seems to be determined to disappear human rights lawyering in China once for all. Ultimately all the challenging questions boil down to this: is there a future for human rights lawyering in China as we know it? After examining the debate on the future of rights lawyering among human rights lawyers, this article proposes three overlapping alternatives for human rights lawyers in the post-crackdown era: a triviality thesis, a co-optation thesis, and a resilience thesis. While the authoritarian system can be suffocating for its enemies, human rights lawyers can struggle to create their own breathing space.

Hualing Fu Interviewed by SCMP on Crackdown on Chinese Human Rights Lawyers, Three Years On

"Trial by fire: three years on from the crackdown that put China's nascent human rights law movement to the test"

Nectar Gan

South China Morning Post

8 July 2018

Sui Muqing was thinking about leaving the law altogether. The forty-something graduate of one of China’s top law schools had an established career in commercial and criminal litigation in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou but was disillusioned by the day-to-day reality.

     “I often felt like a worthless wimp, having to cultivate favour with the authorities and judges. It was merely a job to make a living – I got so tired of it over time,” he said.

     That all changed when he met the city’s leading human rights lawyer Guo Feixiong and found another way to use his advocacy skills.

     Sui was inspired by Guo’s example and started representing the poor and vulnerable, either for free or minimal fees.

     “You can’t only think about the money. There is also the question of dignity, your self-worth, your social value, to which you can find an answer in a rights lawyer’s work,” he said.

      But now Sui is suffering the consequences of his decision, barred from working as a lawyer in the aftermath the “709” crackdown on or soon after July 9, 2015.

     He was one of about 300 rights lawyers, legal assistants and activists rounded up across the nation in a major clampdown on dissent.

     Three years on, those events still reverberate in the rights community, with a string of disbarments, new stifling regulations on lawyers and law firms and the ever-extending reach of the Communist Party into the legal profession.

     Fu Hualing, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong, said the crackdown symbolised “the end of an era” of promoting rule of law and human rights that started in the early 1990s.

     In China, “human rights” did not became part of the official lexicon until 1991, when the State Council, the country’s cabinet, published its first white paper on the subject. At the time, all lawyers were civil servants on the government payroll, but five years later, with the passage of China’s first lawyers law, they became an independent profession... Click here to read the full article.

Zhu Han & Fu Hualing on Transparency as an Offence: Rights Lawyering for Open Government Information in China (J of Comp Law)

"Transparency as an Offence: Rights Lawyering for Open Government Information in China"

Zhu Han & Fu Hualing
The Journal of Comparative Law
published in Feb 2018
Volume 12, Issue 2, pp. 417-436

Introduction: Rights lawyering has been developing in China over the past two decades or so.  From spontaneous reaction to proactive organization, from litigation to civil society networking, from using law as a shield to using it as a sword and from individual cases to policy change, Chinese rights lawyers through social-legal activism have been a formidable social force in holding the state accountable for its rhetoric.  This article examines three ways rights lawyers in China have used transparency as a tool to pursue legal activism and social campaigns: open government information (OGI) applications, on-line mobilization, and off-line action.  For rights lawyers, transparency is both an end and a means to address a wide range of social-political issues.   The chapter finds that the formal OGI institutions have created new legal opportunities and resources for rights lawyering, which has proved to be resilient in promoting government accountability and restraining the arbitrary exercise of public powers. However, the political vulnerability of legal institutions and their lack of political will and ability to accommodate the demands of civil society have given rise to extra-institutional and extra-legal mobilization in a variety of organized street actions by rights lawyers.  The extra-institutional lawyering has provoked retaliation from the state, however, leading to further restrictions on lawyers' right to know and crackdowns on rights lawyering.
     Operating in an authoritarian system with a compliant judiciary, limited rule of law, and little meaningful political participation, Chinese lawyers have few options with which to seek remedies when their rights and interests and those of their clients are adversely affected. Over the past two decades, Chinese lawyers, mostly rights lawyers, have through activist lawyering exploited all available opportunities within the current legal framework by using the existing legal procedures to promote accountability and restrain the arbitrary exercise of powers.
      The promulgation of the Regulations on Open Government Information (the 'ROGI') in 2008 provided a new legal opportunity which lawyers together with other civic groups have readily grasped.  However, while formal OGI institutions have largely failed to satisfy rights lawyears' demands, the institutionalization of rights lawyers and the coming into maturity of a community of rights lawyering, coupled with the development of information technology and enhanced international support, have enabled rights lawyers to take a proactive and occasionally aggressive approach to exposing abuses and in holding public power accountable to the law.  Since the promotion of the ROGI, there has been a shield-to-sword shift in the way in which law is used as an offensive weapon in the hands of right lawyers and activist citizens, with some assertive rights lawyers having moved from online mobilization to off-line action including gathering in courtrooms and protesting on the streets.  Online mobilization and direct actions have primarily served the purpose of publicizing abuses, real and perceived, and making the legal process visible for all to see and to judge.  It is part of a larger strategy of naming and shaming government offenders.   Facing extensive abuse of power in both the political, administrative and the judiciary sectors, transparency has become a weapon for the weak, whose grievances are rarely addressed through institutional channels. 
     This article examines how Chinese lawyers, primarily rights lawyers, have used both institutional and extra-institutional means to demand transparency and government accountability.   Here, the authors adopt a broad definitation of rights lawyers, as 'lawyers or quasi-lawyers who consistently use legal rule and institutions, as well as other platforms, to promote a specific social campaign or the rule-of-law development.'  This definition includes human rights lawyers (renquan lüshi) who devote their work to politically sensitive causes, public-interest lawyers (gongyi lüshi), and the newly-emerged so-called 'die-hard' lawyers (sike lüshi ), mostly criminal defense lawyers (xingshi bianhu lüshi).   The discussion on lawyering for OGI also encompasses ordinary lawyers who have submitted OGI disclosure requests (hereinafter OGI requests).
     The empirical material on which this article is based, in large part, is drawn from a variety of data and materials, including 105 OGI requests made by lawyers between 2008 and 2015, official records and judicial decisions, comprehensive reviews of media reports and documentaries, monitoring of rights lawyers' social media activities, and open-ended interviews with rights lawyers and activists.  The essay examines three ways of transparency-based lawyering: OGI application, online mobilization, and offline activism, and explores also state responses to each method of activism.  It  concludes that ROGI has resulted in new legal opportunities and resources for rights lawyering, which create certain systematic improvements within the formal legal framework possible.   However, facing extensive abuses of power and a fragile legal system, rights lawyers as well as other activist groups have turned to extra-institutional, extra-legal means and used transparency as a sword for a wide range of social agenda.  Extra-institutional efforts have been successful primarily in attracting publicity, raising public consciousness, and enhancing the mobilization capacities of rights lawyers and their allies.  Like the OGI application, online mobilization has rarely achieved dramatic social-legal changes.  At the same time, street action for transparency has incurred greater legal and political risks. 
     

Hualing Fu on The July 9th Crackdown on Human Rights Lawyers (J of Contemporary China)

"The July 9th (709) Crackdown on Human Rights Lawyers: Legal Advocacy in an Authoritarian State"

Hualing Fu
Journal of Contemporary China
published online: 15 Feb 2018

Abstract: This article first studies the 2015 crackdown on human rights lawyers in China and the context in which the crackdown took place. It then analyses the development of three types of human rights lawyers since 2011—the weiquan (rights protection) lawyers, the sike (die-hard) lawyers and the gongyi (public interest) lawyers—the interaction among them and the challenge they pose to the authoritarian governance. Finally, the article proposes three likely scenarios for human rights lawyering in China.

Hualing Fu's Essay on the Future of Human Rights Lawyering in China (Made in China)

"What Future is there for Human Rights Lawyering in China?"
Hualing Fu
Made in China
2017, Vol 2, Issue 2, pp 12-15

Abstract: In the aftermath of the latest wave of repression, Chinese human rights lawyers have started to reflect on their past successes and failures. They also began to express anxiety, frustration, and confusion about their work. Ultimately all the soul searching boils down to one question: is there a future for human rights lawyering in China as we know it? To answer this question, this essay analyses the practices of human rights lawyering, and examines the circumstances in which socio-legal mobilisation may fail or succeed.  Click here to download the full issue.

Roda Mushkat on Greater China as Fertile Ground for Building and Testing International Legal Theory (new article)

"Great China Constitutes Fertile Ground for 'Building' and 'Testing' Positive International Legal Theory"

Roda Mushkat

UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs

2016, Vol. 26, pp 354-390

Abstract: Behavioral analysis of international law has neither moved beyond the exploratory stage nor yielded conclusive results. There have been few meaningful attempts to broaden and synthesize conceptual observations rooted in different analytical perspectives and expand the scope of empirical inquiry by juxtaposing hypotheses with data in non-Western geographic and historical contexts. On a modest scale, but productively so in some key respects, the Greater China setting is the exception to the rule by virtue of serving as an emerging platform for a methodical dissection of an array of behaviorally oriented theoretical schemes. It is worthwhile to highlight the contribution to knowledge made by scholars who have ventured into this challenging intellectual domain and the task that lies ahead. 

Hualing Fu Interviewed on Chinese Lawyer's 7-Year Sentence (WSJ)

"Chinese Lawyer Sentenced to Seven Years in Prison"
Josh Chin
The Wall Street Journal
4 August 2016

A Chinese court sentenced a lawyer whose firm is known for taking on politically sensitive cases to seven years in prison, in what a former colleague said was an unexpectedly harsh sentence, signaling that Beijing intends to keep squeezing the already constricted space for dissent in the country.

     The lawyer, Zhou Shifeng, was a target in a government sweep a year ago in which roughly two dozen lawyers and activists were arrested and more than 300 others briefly detained or interrogated. That began an offensive against what was once a growing human-rights movement among Chinese lawyers.

     Appearing in court on Thursday in the city of Tianjin, Mr. Zhou was the first lawyer among those arrested to face trial. He was sentenced to seven years after he pleaded guilty to subverting state power, according to the official Xinhua News Agency... 

    Mr. Zhou’s sentence suggests other arrested lawyers will face similar punishment. It also indicates authorities’ concern over the influence of lawyers as Chinese President Xi Jinping pushes a broad crackdown aimed at stifling challenges to the Communist Party’s authority.

     “If you look at the landscape of resistance, you don’t see many other people left,” said Fu Hualing, a law professor at Hong Kong University. “Falun Gong is pretty much gone. The only ones that can stand up to the government are the lawyers. They have the organizing power, so they pose a threat.”... Click here to read the full article.

Hualing Fu on the Irony of the Chinese Rural Legal Service

"Away from Grass-roots? The Irony of the Chinese Rural Legal Service"
Hualing Fu
Diogenes

2015, Vol. 60 (3-4), pp 116-132

Abstract: This paper is a modest attempt to study legal pluralism in rural China using rural legal services as a case study. The paper examines three factors that are driving and constraining the development of rural legal services delivery in China: geographic limitation, professional interest and political intervention. First of all, geography matters and rurality creates natural barriers for rural residents in limiting the access to legal services. There is an inherent spatial inequality for rural population when it comes to the distribution of legal service and the geographic isolation and remoteness nurture a particular type of legal culture among rural residents. Second, professionalism matters. There are strong ideological and economic forces which pull the rural legal service providers away from their grass-roots. The calling of an emerging legal professionalism (and the related financial incentives) demands a certain degree of legal knowledge and qualification, rules of procedures, code of conduct and regularity in legal practice. In order to survive in an increasingly competitive legal market, rural legal service providers have to run legal practices as a business, considering the “bottom line” and following the logic of a legal market. Finally, politics matters. To overcome geographic barriers and correct market failure, the government would need to steps-in to provide or supplement legal service in rural areas by introducing a public dimension of legal services. Politics may ameliorate where the legal service market fails.  Contact the author for a copy of the article.

Hualing Fu Interviewed on Detention of Chinese Rights Lawyers (LA Times)

"Human rights lawyers, staffers detained in widespread crackdown across China"
Violet Law
LA Times
11 July 2015

More than 50 Chinese human rights lawyers and staffers have been detained in a roundup spanning nearly half of the country.

      Many of the lawyers were interrogated by police officers and national security officials after being detained Friday. By Saturday night, most had been released after receiving stern warnings, but some faced house arrest. Several remained incommunicado.

     “This is certainly a coordinated, organized crackdown, not ordinary law enforcement,” said Fu Hualing, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong. Fu counted several friends among the detainees.

      Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), a member of the House Foreign Affairs committee, condemned the crackdown and warned of possible diplomatic fallout.

“The detentions come only two weeks after the end of the U.S.-China Strategic & Economic Dialogue and set an ugly tone for President Xi's (Jinping) U.S. visit in September,” Smith said in a statement Friday.

      The mass roundup began with the disappearance of Beijing lawyers Wang Yu and Zhou Shifeng, colleagues at the same law firm well-known for tackling high-profile cases. Zhou “disappeared” hours after he celebrated the release of client Zhang Miao, formerly a news assistant for Die Zeit, a German newsweekly, who was held since October for allegedly organizing activities in support of pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong.... Click here to read the full article.