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4 - Economic Development and the Development of the Legal Profession in China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2011

By
Randall Peerenboom
Edited by
Margaret Y. K. Woo  and
Mary E. Gallagher
Randall Peerenboom
Affiliation:
Oxford University Centre for Socio-Legal Studies; La Trobe University, Melbourne
Margaret Y. K. Woo
Affiliation:
Northeastern University, Boston
Mary E. Gallagher
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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Summary

The development of the legal profession in China since 1978 has been largely a modernization story of economic development. The transition to a market economy stimulated the demand for lawyers. Conversely, lawyers contributed to economic growth, both directly through their work on commercial transactions and protecting property rights, and indirectly by promoting, along with other legal professionals, legal reforms aimed at implementing rule of law and establishing the institutions necessary for a market economy. As such, the development of the legal profession and its relationship to the market in China is broadly consistent with experiences in other countries.

However, whereas China and other East Asian countries lend support to modernization theories, they have also diverged from the more classical straight-line versions whereby all states end up with Euro-American liberal democracy. Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are all economically wealthy countries with legal systems that rank high on rule of law indices and protect both property and non-property rights reasonably well. Yet some of them continue to be nondemocratic, or somewhat dysfunctional democracies, and on the whole less liberal than their economically advanced Western counterparts. Moreover, these East Asian states have not always followed the prescribed path with respect to political reforms, economic policy, or institutional development, including the development of the legal profession.

Much of the concern of Western scholarship on the legal profession in China, and East Asia more broadly, has been on the role of the legal profession in political reforms.

Type
Chapter
Information
Chinese Justice
Civil Dispute Resolution in Contemporary China
 , pp. 114 - 136
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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