The Ecology of Political Activism: Rights-Oriented Lawyering in China

• In Event: 137. Transformations under Xi: A Critical Perspective on Political Change in China

Abstract

In July 2015, the Chinese government orchestrated a large-scale crackdown on activist lawyers, in which more than two hundred lawyers all over China were taken in by the state security apparatus for questioning, detained, or even “disappeared” for weeks. While the international community strongly condemned the crackdown, many lawyers inside China have persisted in doing rights-oriented work despite their precarious positions in the legal system and in politics. Furthermore, the rise of lawyer activism in China in the past decade has coincided with the burgeoning of civil society and the strengthening of the security state under Xi Jinping. This paper takes a new approach to studying lawyer activism, namely, to locate various types of activist lawyers in a social space, or “the ecology of political activism.” In the 2000s, four clusters of activist lawyers (i.e., human rights activists, “die-hard” lawyers, public interest lawyers, feminist and LGBT lawyers) isolated in different sectors of the Chinese legal system and rarely engaged with one another. With the rise of social media such as Weibo and WeChat, some of these lawyers have formed a fairly large national network online. In many recent cases since 2011, they have organized a series of rights-oriented collective action. These lawyers mobilize both inside the courtroom and in the online public sphere, using both traditional legal expertise, online blogging and tweeting, as well as performance arts in public spaces. It is precisely this combination of legal and political mobilizations that led to the July 2015 government crackdown.

Author

• Sida Liu, University of Toronto