Panel presentation :

Since the restoration of the Ministry of Justice and the lawyer's system in the very end of the 1970s in China, the legal profession has developed rapidly. By using the Chinese law to defend the rights of citizens victims of injustice, the lawyers played an essential role in the weiquan movement (rights defense movement) which developed since the middle of the 2000s. Under Xi Jinping's party leadership, a wave of repression began against those right defender and especially the rights defense lawyers. This panel aims to show how lawyers can manage to exercise their profession in a country where the judicial system is not independent. After analyzing the functioning of the judicial system in China and its interactions with politics, this panel explains how lawyers used Chinese law but also some extra-legal resources to defend their customers through detailed cases analyses of expropriated farmers and victims of pollution litigation. The role of media and new media is crucial for helping lawyers to win in the trial. But it raises also some questions by creating dependency on public opinion. The various interventions thus propose a reflection on the place granted to the law in China, the status of the profession of lawyer, the way they can exercise, the repression they face and the reaction of the party-state. Its reaction is indeed discussed as a way to reveal the power that this group has gained and the way the party-state tries to thwart it. This panel leads to a more global reflection on the meaning of the “rule of law” in China, the nature of the political power of the CCP and the way it exercises its power.