Palace wars over professional regulation: Inhouse counsel in chinese state-owned enterprises

Abstract

This paper uses the case of enterprise legal advisors in Chinese stateowned enterprises (SOEs) to investigate the various ways by which the state regulates in-house counsel, an understudied topic in the scholarship on the legal profession. In China's three-decade legal reform since the 1980s, lawyers (lüshi) and enterprise legal advisors (i.e., in-house counsel in SOEs) have been separately licensed and regulated by different government agencies. In 2002, the Ministry of Justice initiated the "corporation lawyer" and "government lawyer" experiments, with the intention to strengthen its control over in-house legal work in enterprises and government agencies, yet both experiments encountered strong resistance and ended in failure. Based on interviews, online ethnography, and archival research, the paper demonstrates how political struggles in the state shapes professional development and inter-professional relations in the market.