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Tag: Lawyers

Lawyers and the Belt and Road Initiative

5. November 2021
A new paper by Lawrence J. Liu
Shanghai Pudong where many of the lawyers supporting the BRI go to work

I emerged from the taxi on a Sunday afternoon and peered up at the skyscrapers that dominate Beijing’s Guomao district. After finding the appropriate gaolou and taking the elevator up to the law firm’s upper floors, one of Mr. Wang’s* associates came out to greet me. Although the offices were largely empty, Mr. Wang’s corner was bustling with activity. Mr. Wang and I spoke for about half an hour before he asked if I would like to continue our conversation over lunch. I agreed, Mr. Wang grabbed a bottle of wine from his fridge, and we went out to eat.

During lunch, we continued our discussion of Mr. Wang’s cross-border legal experiences. He earned his initial degrees from Chinese universities before studying abroad and earning an additional set of European credentials. He returned to China to work at a domestic law firm, where he now specializes in representing Chinese mining companies pursuing projects in Africa. In addition to taking pride in his foreign training, in his foreign-language skills, and in the one foreign-born non-Chinese associate on his team, Mr. Wang is also very proud of China’s outbound development efforts. He criticized the negative portrayals of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) outside of China, noted that “Western” countries were hypocritical for celebrating their own international work while casting aspersions on China’s, and he applauded Chinese companies’ willingness to take risks that foreign companies no longer take.

Interest abounds in whether China’s outbound ambitions are changing the rules of the international legal order. Many have adopted an international-relations lens that focuses on state-to-state dynamics. This interest in the forest instead of the trees is not incorrect, but it shifts attention away from the sources of the norms that would underlie any potential new order—such as the Chinese lawyers who are intimately involved in the day-to-day work of initiatives like the BRI. Interviews with Mr. Wang and others reflect the complex role played by Chinese lawyers that sit at the boundary of two competing scripts. From one perspective, many are “Western”-trained and provide cross-border legal services developed and spread by “Western” states. From another, lawyers like Mr. Wang are encouraged by the Chinese government to serve on the frontlines of its international development efforts.

In previous work, I have emphasized the need for scholars to recognize variation within China’s legal profession and to examine the ways in which the state may rely on “state-adjacent” lawyers as citizen-partners in governance. “The Rules of the (Belt and) Road: How Lawyers Participate in China’s Outbound Investment and Infrastructure Initiatives” takes up these calls by focusing on another slice of the legal profession that is involved in state-led policy efforts: the 84 Chinese lawyers who have been identified by the All China Lawyers Association (ACLA) as “BRI and Cross-Border Legal Experts.” My research suggests that the BRI and Cross-Border Legal Expert is a highly educated male with extensive foreign experiences as well as strong ties to the state and the Chinese Communist Party.

To obtain a deeper understanding of these lawyers’ views and work, I also interviewed eleven experts or their associates in Beijing and Shanghai. I document how BRI and Cross-Border Legal Experts draw on knowledge buckets that highlight their familiarity with transnational best practices. At the same time, these Experts recognize and help shape the political context surrounding their work. Though most BRI and Cross-Border Legal Experts naturally became involved in BRI projects as their clients’ sights shifted abroad, many (like Mr. Wang) want to see the BRI succeed, even as they also recognize the need for continued policy reforms.

As China continues its global rise, will Chinese lawyers’ stance vis-à-vis the status quo become more subversive than complementary? Perhaps, though I would argue that it is still too early to say. Ongoing work should continue to monitor these dynamics by adopting a similar bottom-up approach. If and when China’s BRI lawyers begin to prioritize Chinese state scripts over existing norms of transnational practice, this should worry those who are committed to the “Western”-led international order. Until then, we should remain attentive to the words and actions of on-the-ground actors like China’s BRI and Cross-Border Legal Experts, those that make state policy a reality.

Find Lawrence Liu‘s paper here.

Lawrence J. Liu is a PhD student in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at Berkeley Law as well as a JD candidate at Yale Law School. His research interests are in administrative law and regulatory politics, law and globalization, the legal profession, and state-society relations, with a focus on contemporary China.


* Mr. Wang is a pseudonym for one of my interviewees in Beijing.

General Lawyers, One Belt One Road

China’s multinationals and their US lawyers

16. August 2021
A new paper by Ji Li

Chinese multinational companies (MNCs), key agents in China’s global expansion, have caught considerable attention as the US-China rivalry escalates. Top Chinese MNCs such as Huawei, ByteDance, and Xiaomi face unprecedented political, regulatory, and legal risks in the United States, which, if poorly managed, pose existential threat. Are Chinese MNCs capable of negotiating the risks? The answer is certainly no if the MNC managers, most of whom lack basic understanding of U.S. law, do not delegate extensively to legal professionals. In other words, U.S. lawyers play an indispensable role in helping Chinese MNCs navigate the increasingly complex and hostile U.S. legal and regulatory landscape. Yet little is known about how Chinese MNCs interact with their outside counsel, as the existing literature on corporate consumption of legal services has largely neglected developing country MNCs. Ji Li addresses Chinese MNCs’ in-house legal counsels in the United States in his article “Going Out” and Going In-House: Chinese Multinationals’ Internal Legal Capacity in the United States.  

Li empirically explores several major aspects of Chinese MNCs as consumers in the U.S. legal market. Do they take professional legal advice seriously? The qualitative evidence (i.e., interviews with lawyers, in-house counsel, and other business professionals) tells a mixed story. While some view Chinese MNCs as not notably different from U.S. companies, others complain about habitual disrespect for lawyers and under-appreciation of the importance of quality legal services for running business in the United States. However, the quantitative evidence (i.e., data based on a comprehensive survey of Chinese MNCs in the United States) indicates that, on balance, Chinese investors recognize U.S. legal services as being costly but essential for their U.S. operations.

That said, in a market of 1.3 million registered U.S. lawyers, most of whom are self-claimed “leading experts” in their respective practice areas, how do Chinese MNC managers without U.S. legal expertise collect accurate and truthful lawyer information? The study reveals that Chinese managers surmount severe information asymmetry by relying primarily on trusted and knowledgeable third parties for U.S. lawyer recommendations (for more about Chinese MNCs’ lawyer selection preferences, see “What Do Chinese Clients Want?”). Additionally, the study finds that most Chinese MNCs spend relatively insignificant amounts of money on U.S. legal services, leaving them with minimal bargaining power vis-à-vis their legal service providers. It is therefore not uncommon for top U.S. firms to treat Chinese MNCs as “second class clients.”  

Obviously, all Chinese MNCs are not the same, and their U.S. legal expenses vary significantly. Huawei and ByteDance probably spend millions of dollars a year purchasing U.S. legal services, whereas many report annual legal budgets of less than a hundred thousand dollars. What explains the inter-company variations? For instance, all else being equal, do state-owned Chinese MNC spend more on U.S. lawyers? After all, “it’s not their own money,” noted a knowledgeable informant. The study finds that the U.S. legal expenses of Chinese MNCs vary according to their legal service demand, not special corporate attributes such as ownership structure, which Li argues is another sign that Chinese MNCs have limited impact on the U.S. legal market due to their lack of leverage. The findings of this study contribute to ongoing debates about Chinese MNCs, their adaptation to host country institutions, and their impacts on the legal profession and the global legal service market. 

Ji Li’s paper “Meeting Law’s Demand: Chinese Multinationals as Consumers of U.S. Legal Services” was published in Yale Journal of International Law online and is available for free here.

Ji Li (jli[at]law.uci.edu) is John S. and Marilyn Long Professor of U.S.-China Business and Law at UC Irvine School of Law. His book, Clash of Capitalisms: Chinese Companies in the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2018), examines the adaptation of Chinese investors to the U.S. legal and regulatory system. His other publications can be downloaded here.

General Lawyers

Chinese Lawyers in Politics

1. December 2020
A new paper by Lawrence Liu and Rachel Stern
Politically on track – Lawyer Ding Liying (丁立莹) received the All China Lawyers Association’s title of National Outstanding Lawyer in 2016

Mr. Zhou* briskly entered the conference room, shook my hand, and apologized for his tardiness. He had just completed an interview with a state-run newspaper and had lost track of time. I thanked him for squeezing me into his busy schedule, and after a bit of small talk, we began our conversation. As with all of our interviewees, I first asked Mr. Zhou whether being selected as a National Outstanding Lawyer by the All China Lawyers Association (ACLA) had an effect on his work or life. Mr. Zhou took this as an opportunity to mention that he has actually won over 400 government awards. In fact, his legal work and ideas for legal reform have even received recognition from Xi Jinping, and Mr. Zhou pulled up his WeChat profile to show off a photo with President Xi in the foreground and him smiling nearby.

Conversations like the one we had with Mr. Zhou reflect an understudied perspective on the relationship between Chinese lawyers and the Chinese government. Much attention has rightly been paid to the brave activist lawyers who have wielded the law as a tool for social change and to the Chinese government’s increasingly repressive response. Showdowns with the state are not the only ways in which Chinese lawyers engage in politics, however.  

In “State-Adjacent Professionals: How Chinese Lawyers Participate in Political Life,” we focus on a group of “state-adjacent” lawyers that serve as trusted citizen-partners in governance, specifically the lawyers who have won the ACLA’s National Outstanding Lawyer Award. Our research on the 600-plus lawyers who received the Outstanding Lawyer Award between 2005 and 2014 shows that ACLA’s process typically results in the selection of a well-read, domestically educated male with strong ties to China’s bar association. Limited data on awardees’ party affiliations suggest that Outstanding Lawyers are also more likely to be members of the Chinese Communist Party.

To understand how and why Outstanding Lawyers participate in politics, we also interviewed twenty eight award-winners in four Chinese cities. We document how Outstanding Lawyers draw on their legal expertise to make suggestions to officials, sometimes through institutions such as the People’s Congresses and sometimes more informally, such as sharing opinions with officials over dinner. In addition, lawyers’ professional status helps them convince disgruntled clients to play by the political rules, and to funnel their grievances through the courts rather than protesting outside of them. We argue that this is an important form of political participation, which shows how blurry the line can be between the governors and the governed. What do lawyers get out of this type of political participation, which is often voluntary and unpaid? Although we do not discount the potential monetary and reputational benefits, we find that awardees are committed believers in gradual reform through cooperation with government officials.

Of course, there are also limits to state-sanctioned political participation. Not only are there limits on the types of advocacy lawyers can pursue, but also on who gets to participate. Like many opportunities in contemporary China, well-connected, older men are overrepresented among state-adjacent lawyers.

As the number of Chinese professionals continues to grow, will we see other types of “state-adjacent” professionals? We close with the suggestion that the answer is yes. Multiple types of state-adjacent professionals likely will participate in politics by channeling information to the government and persuading citizens to buy into government priorities.   

Find the full paper, published in The China Quaterly and available for free download via open access here.

Lawrence J. Liu is a PhD student in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at Berkeley Law as well as a JD Candidate at Yale Law School. His research interests are in administrative law and regulatory politics, law and globalization, and state-society relations, with a focus on how “law” legitimizes or challenges governance efforts in contemporary China. Follow him on Twitter or contact him at ljliu(at)berkeley.edu.

Rachel E. Stern is a professor of law and political science in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at Berkeley Law, where she currently holds the Fong Chair in China Studies. Her research looks at law in mainland China and Hong Kong, especially the relationship between legal institution building, political space, and professionalization. Follow her on Twitter or contact her at rstern(at)law.berkeley.edu


* Mr. Zhou is a pseudonym for one of our interviewees in Beijing.

General Law and Politics, Lawyers, state-adjacency

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