This English version may have been machine-generated from the Chinese original and may not convey the original meaning accurately.
What is most alarming about this report is not merely that several civil and commercial lawyers have faced criminal prosecution, but a deeper fact: in China, lawyers cannot determine the boundaries of legal risk, or even whether representation that is lawful today might, several years later, be recharacterized because of changes in their clients, their fields of practice, or the political environment.
According to the report, as the “campaign to crack down on organized crime and eliminate local criminal networks” and its follow-up efforts have unfolded, civil cases involving private enterprises, real estate, financial risks, mass incidents, foreign investment, and even sexual harassment on campus and migrant workers’ wage claims may all be assigned “sensitive” significance. Lawyers must assess not only legal issues, but also the background of the parties, the government’s governance objectives, and public-opinion effects; some cases may even require confirmation from a law firm, a bar association, or a judicial-administrative authority. Judges’ tendency to handle cases through private mediation or withdrawal of claims, together with administrative authorities summoning lawyers for meetings and requiring reports, has also cast the shadow of power over judicial procedures that should be public and independent.
Gao Bingfang was sentenced for the crime of filing a false lawsuit after representing migrant workers seeking unpaid wages, while Feng Bo incurred criminal liability for having previously provided legal services to the president of a chamber of commerce who was later deemed to have been involved in organized crime. The specific facts and legal grounds for the judgments in these cases should still be subjected to rigorous, public, and independent scrutiny. The report itself is not a substitute for a judicial conclusion, but the chilling effect these cases have produced is real and clear: to protect themselves, lawyers may refuse high-risk clients; to avoid trouble, parties may abandon litigation; and socially vulnerable people may consequently find it even more difficult to obtain professional assistance.
The root of the problem is not whether lawyers should be held responsible for illegal conduct, but who defines what is “illegal,” whether the basis is clear, whether procedures are fair, and whether law-enforcement officials can be effectively constrained. When the judiciary is not independent, news and freedom of expression are restricted, and bar associations cannot genuinely protect lawyers’ professional rights, the law may be transformed from a set of rules protecting rights into a tool for those in power to reinterpret past conduct. In a system of one-party rule where power lacks checks and balances, “handling cases according to law,” without independent trials, open evidence, and effective defense as safeguards, can hardly provide reassurance.
A genuine rule of law cannot require citizens to first guess the intentions of those in power before deciding whether to exercise their rights. Only constitutional democracy, democratic elections, the separation of powers, judicial independence, and effective protection of lawyers’ professional practice, defendants’ rights to legal representation, and fundamental human rights can stabilize legal expectations and prevent individual cases from being politicized and ordinary representation from being criminalized. The sense of security in civil society should not come from obedience to power, but from the assurance that rights can be protected by law and power can be reviewed under the law.
News background: The original report on which this commentary is based can be found at BBC Chinese。