ABSTRACT
Legal practice for many Chinese lawyers is fraught with difficulties and dangers. The challenges they routinely face include various forms of obstruction, harassment, intimidation, and even physical abuse, often at the hands of public security administration (the police system) personnel, the procuracy (the public prosecutor’s office), and courts-lumped together in common parlance as the gongjianfa. Surviving and even thriving in this hostile institutional environment demands formal and informal ties to the state bureaucracy. The story of Chinese lawyers is the story of barriers and bridges. Since the
revival of the legal profession in 1979, Chinese lawyers have tried to surmount the meso-and macro-level institutional barriers stymieing their work by building micro-level bridges to the public actors who control the resources on which they depend. They have mobilized personal, particularistic relations, or guanxi, in their efforts to find refuge from the troubles that plague their work, and to gain access to public actors inside the judiciary and elsewhere in the state bureaucracy who can expedite, facilitate, and simplify their work. Guanxi comes in many forms. Public actors oblige overtures from needy lawyers owing to their preexisting affective relations, often to help out an old friend or colleague. They also oblige lawyers in exchange for rents, as part of their instrumental moneyinfluence exchange relations with lawyers. But valuable ties to the state come in forms besides individual political connections. Lawyers affiliated with organizations embedded in the state bureaucracy, too, enjoy shelter from the predatory behavior of state actors while enjoying privileged access and support from them. In short, the guanxi on which lawyers rely in their everyday work includes a diverse portfolio of direct and indirect, individual and organizational ties to the state that must be conceptualized more generally as political embeddedness. In a little over a decade (prior to 1999), the Chinese bar completed an about-
face from a fully public profession to an almost fully private profession. In the process of “unhooking and privatizing,” as they lost their formal state-sector membership, lawyers’ individual-level guanxi helped fill the void left in the wake of retreating organizational-level support. As they unhooked from the state at a macro level, lawyers found ways to stay hooked and to rehook by mobilizing micro-level political connections. Insofar as legal reform is commonly theorized
as eroding the value of ties to political officeholders, lawyers’ mobilizations of political connections function as a theoretically important, albeit ironic, strategy for navigating their hostile institutional terrain.
