By Jerome A. Cohen
This China Daily story on Beijing’s lawyers has recently been called to my attention. The Ministry of Justice has published data from 2019 on the number of lawyers, law firms, and revenue generated, among other things. It shows the great growth in the legal profession since its renewal following the rise of Deng Xiaoping in 1978. Deng, of course, had been Party Secretary-General in 1957 when Mao launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign that put China’s then Soviet-style lawyers out of action for over two decades. When in August 1979 the Beijing Economic Development Corporation asked me to organize an international commercial law training program for city officials, none of whom had legal training, only a handful of lawyers had begun to reemerge and it took several years for legal education to be revived and lawyers and law firms to be formally authorized once again.
Unfortunately, the statistics that were just released are not comprehensive. They fail, for example, to mention the number of lawyers who have been disbarred and the number of law firms that have been forced to close (many for political reasons). Some of the statistics seem surprising, such as the small number of supporting staff (this may be a definitional problem) and the small number of arbitration cases in which lawyers took part, probably a reflection of the fact that most arbitrations have not involved significant enough claims to make retention of lawyers sensible or feasible for claimants. The small number of criminal cases in which lawyers took part is not a surprise, since most Chinese criminal defendants have gone without lawyers, especially in lesser criminal cases. Note the very big jump in lawyers’ revenue (a year-on-year growth of 16.64%). It’s an incentive for them not to risk the good life by getting drawn into a range of tempting human rights matters that often end lawyers’ careers and even their personal freedom.