Introduction

This chapter analyses legal aid in China.^[265] In doing so, it examines state-run legal assistance projects, professional lawyers, bar associations, organised pro bono work,^[266] as well as law schools’ pro bono clinics.

¹ I wish to thank Dr Qian Cheng for his help in providing historical archive materials and contributing some points to this research.

² Pro bono means that professional lawyers should voluntarily donate their billable hours to people who need legal assistance, without expecting a fee or by giving a substantive fee reduction. See The American Bar Association Standing Committee on Pro Bono and Public Service (2021).

argument of this chapter is that the creation and development of Chinese legal aid must be understood from the perspective of globalisation.

In China, a new infrastructure for legal aid is currently being created by multiple parties. A few years ago, the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) declared that state-run legal aid centres had been established in all Chinese rural counties.^[267] The MOJ, along with the All Chinese Lawyers’ Association (ACLA)—the nationwide bar association in China—is in the process of revising the ethical rules and conduct codes for lawyers in order to make legal aid a central responsibility of lawyers. Large (Chinese) law firms are conducting their own pro bono projects through committees, which are identifying new pro bono opportunities, developing innovative projects, and allocating resources.^[268] In the field of legal education, so far, over 200 law schools or departments have established pro bono clinical training programmes for teaching law students to engage in pro bono work.^[269]

Not surprisingly, these efforts to create a new infrastructure for legal aid have been widely recognised as a great milestone and part of the rule of law within socialism with Chinese characteristics.^[270] But this achievement for legal aid involves a complex and longstanding process of globalisation in China.

Previous research on Chinese legal aid has focused on the creation of national legislation, codes, procedures, courts, and state bureaucracies.^[272] Yet, there is little research that extensively explores how legal aid in China is or has been part of globalisation and how Chinese legal actors at mul­tiple levels, such as bar associations, lawyers, public interest organisations, scholars, and legal education, worked together between 1890 and 2003 to create a legal system and with it a conception of legal aid as well as a system for providing legal aid. This chapter provides a historical framework for investigating what is distinctive about the interaction between the global diffusion of legal institutions and the development of legal aid since the 1890s in China.

Legal scholars in the United States have long used the classical model of global diffusion to explain the transplanting of pro bono work and pub­lic interest law as well as legal aid.^[273] Theoretically, global diffusion means that legal institutions and values from Western core countries (such as the United States, France, and Germany) are seen as a global prescription for instituting the rule of law. Non-Western, or so-called periphery countries (e.g., China), have had to transplant laws, regulations, procedures, as well as institutions from Western core counties to theoretically create the rule of law.^[274] Examining the history of Chinese legal aid from 1890 to 2003, we see that this kind of legal transplantation occurred in China in different stages. Such an analysis allows us to see how legal globalisation focused on legal aid work across cultures and legal systems.

Generally, the history of legal aid in China from 1890 to 2003 can be divided into four distinct stages, which shape the structure of this article, as well: I. The late Qing Dynasty 1890-1911; II. The Beijing government 1912-1927; III. The Kuomintang (KMT) government 1928-1949; and IV. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) government 1949-2003.