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Climbing the Weiquan Ladder: A Radicalizing Process for Rights-Protection Lawyers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2011

Fu Hualing  and
Richard Cullen
Fu Hualing
Affiliation:
The University of Hong Kong. Email: [email protected] (corresponding author).
Richard Cullen
Affiliation:
The University of Hong Kong.
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Abstract

It is commonly acknowledged that weiquan lawyers operate in a narrow space, and lawyers with a radical stance work within a harsh environment. Weiquan lawyers advance and retreat in response to the changing macro-political-legal environment, but there is no sign that they are giving up their legal struggles. A steadily growing number of weiquan lawyers are tending to become more radical in their approach as their experience advances. This article studies the process in which weiquan lawyers start and sustain weiquan lawyering in a harsh environment and the factors that contribute to the radicalizing process. Its principal purpose is to identify and explain a radicalization process in which a lawyer climbs up the ladder of weiquan lawyering, from a moderate lawyer providing legal aid in individual cases to a critical or radical lawyer.

Type
Articles
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 205 , March 2011 , pp. 40 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 2011

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References

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3 Existing literature tends to focus on moderate weiquan lawyering. See for example, Hualing, Fu, “Access to justice and constitutionalism in China,” in Balme, Stéphanie and Dowdle, Michael W. (eds.), Building Constitutionalism in China (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2009)Google Scholar; Gallagher, Mary E., “Mobilizing the law in China: ‘informed disenchantment’ and the development of legal consciousness,” Law & Society Review, Vol. 40, No. 4 (2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 783; Liebman, Benjamin L., “Legal aid and public interest law in China,” Texas International Law Journal, No. 34 (1999)Google Scholar, p. 211; Michelson, Ethan, “The practice of law as an obstacle to justice: Chinese lawyers at work,” Law & Society Review, Vol. 40, No. 1 (2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 1.

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