ABSTRACT
Shortly after the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1970s, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) embarked on the most concerted effort in world history to develop a legal system (Lubman 1999). Almost from the outset, one of the most crucial questions confronting this effort has been that of what type of personnel might best serve as an interface between the citizenry and this system, given that China at that time had but 3,000 lawyers and few other individuals knowledgeable about law (Alford 2007a). One answer, originating in the late 1970s in a top-down manner, was to restore and vastly increase the number of lawyers (lüshi 律师). An alternative, initially a product of rural experimentation and then promoted nationally in the early 1980s, lay with a quite different model – that of para-professionals known as “basic-level legal workers” (jiceng falü gongzuozhe 基层法律工作者), although I prefer to use the term rice-roots legal workers, except when translating the formal title of a legal measure.1
