Changes to the legal profession in the post-Mao years led to significant changes regarding courts and judicial autonomy that have been deeply intertwined with the stratification of living standards, dramatic growth of the Chinese legal profession, and emergence of significant income differentials for lawyers across urban localities, especially after 1992. This details these dynamics, which are consistent with this book’s ecological explanation of court reform, which posits that the structure and process of socio-legal forms have an interactive relationship; I also provide evidence in the second part of this chapter suggesting that these dynamics in the social forms of law influence the substance of law, for example, the decisions of court leaders in urban China to increase transparency of their courts and enhance the statutory basis of their judicial decisions. These developments also indicate expansions in judges’ overall decisional autonomy, as discussed in Chapter 1.

The strategic judicial responses to the Case Quality Assessment System (CQAS), detailed in the previous chapter, provide necessary context for understanding how the stratification of local markets for legal services in urban China can affect court reform and the decisional autonomy of judges. Variation in the development of the legal profession in different urban localities is the focus of this chapter, which also traces the major spatial and temporal shifts that have influenced lawyers’ career choices, and in turn, judicial designs in urban China. A spatially informed explanation of socio-legal processes and their structural effects begins with the higher salaries, standards, and status available to lawyers in “high-end” local legal service markets; the temporal analysis concentrates on how these dynamics were made possible by national recommitments to liberalizing reforms in the late twentieth century and then accelerated in the early twenty-first century.

Despite the consolidation of Communist power and the encouragement of President Xi Jinping’s cult of personality, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has also surprisingly moved to expand judicial autonomy during Xi’s term in office. This chapter discusses that the years leading up to sweeping reforms to enhance the autonomy of China’s judges, local promotion systems for mid-ranking judges in some case study localities featured enhanced transparency, competition, and the routinization of judicial promotion procedures that departed from previous systems of direct nomination and appointment by local Party leaders. Based on nearly two years of in-country fieldwork, I present the broad contours that the expansion of the legal profession pressured judicial leadership to enact these and similar changes, a theory and approach that both challenges and contributes to the extant literature on comparative court politics and Chinese judicial politics.

This chapter provides a comprehensive account of the main argument of the book and its supporting evidence and limitations, describes developments in China’s judicial politics since 2016, and then discusses implications of this book for future research in the field. Framed in the context of nationwide reforms to enhance judicial autonomy between 2014 and 2016, which I find were motivated by a constellation of similar local concerns including judicial “brain drain,” rapid increases in the cost of living in urban China, and the major transformations of the legal profession particularly prevalent in high-end localities elucidated throughout this book.

At the outset of the post-Mao reform era in 1978, there was little semblance of an organized legal profession in China – certainly not in a formal sense. The globally unprecedented growth of the legal profession in the subsequent decades, however, led to significant changes in China’s courts and its broader legal system, and this chapter begins telling the story of how these changes occurred. What began as a state-led efforts to construct a professional class of lawyers largely began in the early 1980s transformed into a privatized expansion effort closely related to inbound foreign investment into China. In the early twenty-first century, the growth of the legal profession pressuring courts to recalibrate various institutional practices related to judicial autonomy, particularly in urban areas, in order to stem the attrition of judges leaving courts for law firm employment opportunities.

Judicial performance evaluation systems, such as The Case Quality Assessment System (CQAS), examined in this chapter, provided the baseline institutional incentives for Chinese judges and determines the stakes for judges’ career-related decisions, setting up dynamic interactions between legal processes, forms, and substances in urban China. In the terms of ecology-based socio-legal theory, judges in these distinct strata act to enhance their own survival in a process of “competitive co-operation.” Judges’ navigation of the CQAS is critical to understanding the influence of stratified local legal markets in urban China on judicial selection institutions and personal autonomy.

This chapter bolsters the overall ecological theory of court reform by assessing an alternative explanation rooted primarily in top-down, state-centered logic – one assuming that leaders from the central CCP, state, or both have comprehensively determined the nature and extent of institutional change. One mechanism by which legal forms like judicial selection and promotion mechanisms could change in top-down fashion would be the central Party–State’s allocation of judicial personnel headcount (i.e., bianzhi) to local courts through the personnel management system. This chapter, however, presents evidence that this is not the case – despite differences in geography and development, court systems in Chengdu, Shenzhen, and Shanghai all demonstrated robust capabilities during the post-Mao era to expand and diversify their court and judicial structures, suggesting that top-down theories of court politics do not explain the local variation I describe in this book.