The Era of the Beijing Government (1912-1927)

Although the Qing government and its affiliated social reformers made great efforts carrying out social reforms in order to avoid crisis, it was ultimately replaced by the republican government following the 1911 Revolution.

The Beijing government understood the important role that the legal profession and professional lawyers played in Western legal systems and sought to build a legal profession with a “Western look.” Promulgated by the ROC Ministry of Justice, the first code for professional lawyers, the Lawyers' Interim Codes, went into effect in 1912. This was a watershed moment in Chinese legal history. The promulgation of the code declared the birth of Chinese professional lawyers. It was the first time that lawyers and the legal profession became part of the Chinese legal system.^[292] Adopted from the Japanese system, the code addressed lawyers’ qualifica­tions, bar examinations, legal education, the role of bar associations, and the discipling of lawyers.^[293] In 1914, the Ministry of Justice of the ROC promulgated the Approved Act of Designated Defenders, which stipulated lawyers’ duties to provide free legal assistance by designation of the presid­ing judge. The Act was written to fill a gap in the lawyers’ code regarding lawyers’ duties to provide free legal service for the poor in criminal cases.^[294] From this point on, providing legal aid in criminal cases became an impor­tant part of Chinese lawyers’ daily legal practice.

In this same period, professional lawyering emerged, playing an impor­tant role in creating the provision of legal aid through lawyers’ pro bono work. Many Chinese went overseas and obtained law degrees from Western countries. They then began to practise law in large Chinese cities, either for local governments or for the concession governments dedicated to promoting professional lawyering. As the Beijing government officially recognised lawyers as a profession and set forth practice qualifications sim­ilar to those in Western countries, Chinese professional lawyers flourished. Further, these changes led to the rapid growth in the number of profes­sional lawyers in China’s large cities. At the end of 1912, the Ministry of Justice licensed a total of 297 lawyers. In the following year, the number of lawyers licensed reached 2716.^[295]

The rapid development of lawyering in China led to the rise of lawyers engaging in pro bono activities, as many of them had seen in the West dur­ing their studies abroad. Serving the public good through free legal ser­vice started to be common for the first generation of Chinese legal professionals. For example, in 1924, Wang Fengying, an attorney practis­ing law in the Beijing area, published an article, “Lawyers’ Duty on Judicial Reform,” which argued that Chinese lawyers had an inherent professional responsibility to work for the public good through organised legal aid.^[296] In another article, “Lawyers’ Legal Aid Society,” also published in 1924, Fengying wrote about local legal aid societies in U.S. cities including San Francisco, Boston, and New York.^[297]

Meanwhile, the first-generation bar associations in China came to accept the value of pro bono work and became engaged in providing free legal aid to the poor. In 1912, the Shanghai Bar Association (SBA), the first Chinese run bar association, was founded. The Beijing Bar Association (BBA) was formed around the same time.

As a leading and well-known bar association in China, the SBA and its members were dedicated to promoting legal aid service and fulfilling their pro bono commitments to disadvantaged individuals and organisations in society. In 1924, the SBA was the first organised bar to collectively provide pro bono services to the public. When workers’ and employers’ organisa­tions or their members were unable to hire lawyers, they could apply for free legal assistance from the SBA. More importantly, in 1924, the earliest legal aid society in China, the “Shanghai Lawyers’ Legal Aid Society,” was officially established. Through the arrangement of the SBA, this organisa­tion was able to collectively provide lawyers’ pro bono services to the poor in Shanghai.^[299] In the following year, organised legal aid societies were established by the Chongqing and Minhou Bar Associations, respectively. More specifically, the legal aid society in Minhou, called the volunteer defence lawyer society, was established following the format of legal aid societies in the United States and Europe.^[300]

At this stage, the rise of civil society in many Chinese large cities was seen as a response to the further expansion of the value of the rule of law from the West. As a direct result, Chinese professional lawyers began to participate in political movements to pursue social justice. Volunteer legal assistance for clients involved in political activity began to be offered by a small group of Chinese professional lawyers committed to supporting social causes.^[301]

Beijing was the centre of the liberal political movement in China. As the spearhead of the so-called May Fourth Movement,^[302] the Beijing Bar Association voluntarily designated lawyers to provide free legal services to left-wing college students who were arrested and charged in 1919.

In the 1920s, the Chinese working class began to work together to request political rights from the state government administrated by war­lords. To assert such rights, worker and labour organisations emerged in large Chinese cities. Some Chinese lawyers devoted themselves to helping these workers fight for their political rights by providing free legal aid. In Wuhan, Shi Yang, a lawyer who was a member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), jointly led the revolutionary Great Strike of 7 February 1923, fighting for railroad workers’ political rights. As a professional law­yer, Shi Yang was invited to be the general counsel for the Wuhan Labour Unit, a labour rights organisation in Wuhan, Hubei. Shi Yang long pro­vided free legal assistance to railroad workers and helped them assert their rights as workers against arbitrary state power. Therefore, he was com­monly viewed as a human rights activist and social cause lawyer.^[304]

Western legal education also continued to heavily affect the rise of law­yers’ involvement in legal aid. In the Republican era (1912-1949), a large portion of Chinese lawyers received their law degrees in Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, or Germany. In 1925, over one hundred Chinese students were studying law at top U.S. law schools. Also, between 1921 and 1925, 185 students were studying law in European countries.^[305] Even though some law students preferred to be educated in China, Chinese law schools were themselves based on American and French mod- els.^[306] Since China did not have a tradition of legal education, the resources for legal education (professors, textbooks and curriculum, student activi­ties) had to be transplanted from the West. The value of pro bono legal assistance also was diffused directly into Chinese law schools. The Soochow University Law School, built in 1915, and primarily teaching Anglo- American law, introduced the model of the student-led “Legal Aid Bureau” from U.S. law schools. It was a first-generation-student-run legal aid organisation embedded within a Chinese law school.^[307]

Unlike top-to-bottom government efforts through a small number of individual Westernised scholars and professionals in the late stage of the Qing government, the value of the rule of law including civil liberties were gradually accepted by the elite Chinese social classes. Led by such elites, especially the first generation of legal professionals in China, legal aid prac­tices did not only depend upon government promulgated laws and proce­dures but was developed through the rise of lawyering, legal education, and civil society.