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.