Due to the political sensitivity of the topic, very little academic research on China’s human rights lawyers has come from Chinese scholars. As a Western scholar having worked in the Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law for a significant length of time, the author has had unique access to the community of human rights lawyers in China, which is extraordinary and is shown through the book’s research method section (pp. 10–15) even though the author describes it as constraints and difficulties she faced during the research. The neutral and balanced view the book offers is valuable not only to non-Chinese communities seeking to truly understand the complexity of the issue in China, but more importantly to China’s human rights cause. Overall this book provides much needed systematic analysis and critical review of problems and issues faced by human rights lawyers in China, including exploring the deep roots of the systemic problems.
The book first lays out a clear historical background of human rights lawyers in China, including the ancient Chinese concept of “litigation masters” and the injustice concept of Yuan, development from the late Qing dynasty to the cultural revolution, to Deng Xiaoping’s reforms and opening era, to the recent rise of the rights defence movement. In Chapter Three, the legal and political context of human rights lawyers in China is discussed, including what kind of rights lawyers work on (in particular social and economic rights, and liberty), what legal and political challenges they face, and the legal institutions and processes involved, with a particular focus on the judiciary. Chapters Four to Six focus on issues faced by human rights lawyers in the courtroom, legal profession (such as All China Lawyers Association and Justice Department, Chapter Five) and various security bureaus respectively. Chapters Seven and Eight discuss the solutions and implications in a broader sense.
The book correctly points out the conflict between liberalism underlying the rights movement and the political roots and ideology of China’s ruling elite. Interestingly, the book challenges the view represented by Randall Peerenboom that the rule of law development is correlated with economic development (pp. 178–181). Among all the issues faced by the human rights lawyers, the Party’s involvement and control of the legal profession has been emphasized. What has been discussed in the chapter on the relationship between rights lawyers and the security apparatus is “eye-opening”, including those measures from soft detention, “chats”, pressure/threat on the family, to forced disappearance and torture. The observation of the concurrent growth of the normative and prerogative state in China captures the complexity of the issue (p. 225).
The book is very interesting, but one of its striking features is that it narrows down human rights lawyers to those who are “at constant risk of being detained, harassed and abused” (p. 1), which excludes those lawyers in China who work in the human rights field but to some extent within the system. It would be worthwhile to understand why different lawyers choose different pathways, and which way would be effective in improving human rights in China in both the short and long term.
