Non-Professional Access to Justice in Rural China: A History of Atypical Legal Development and Legal Service Provision

Abstract

This paper provides a corrective to the conventional discourse on legal development in modern and contemporary China. By mapping the landscape of non-professional legal service provision crossing over modern and contemporary history, this research proposes a new analytical framework for understanding lawyering, professionalization and access to justice in China. Previous studies present an urban-centric view and highlight the alternativeness and transitional nature of non-professional legal service providers (who operate primarily in rural China) vis-à- vis the professionally trained and qualified lawyers (who serve primarily in urban China).The urban-oriented discourse downplays, if not ignores, the historical fact that the ordinary people of China, mostly residing in rural areas, have relied on non-professional legal workers as their mainstream access to justice for centuries, with demand for their services remaining largely unchanged throughout the Qing, Republican, Mao and post-Mao eras despite the attempted monopolization of the legal market by qualified lawyers. This paper therefore argues for a reorientation of the conventional inquiry concerning the path towards the professionalization of lawyering in China that is framed in terms of license-based expertise and access. Rural legal workers, this paper further argues, will, and should be allowed to, continue to meet the legal demand of the broader rural masses in China, demand that can hardly be met by the socially elite qualified lawyers practising in urbanised China and provide, together with the qualified legal profession, dual-core access to justice in China.