China's Human Rights Lawyers: Advocacy and Resistance

by Eva Pils. Routledge, 2015, 298 pp.

Pils, a legal scholar, interviewed nearly half of the 200 or so lawyers in China who try to use Chinese courts to protect citizens from abuse by local officials and police. They were typically drawn into this type of work by encounters with clients who had been tortured into false confessions or who had lost their houses to corrupt developers. As they were radicalized by the Kafkaesque obstacles they confronted in court, these "rights protection" lawyers (as they are known in China) developed a strategy of "taking the play for the real": arguing their cases as if the legal system were independent and using the inevitable defeats to show that it is not. Pils provides extraordinary insight into how the government controls lawyers through a mix of bureaucratic procedures and extralegal coercion and how the legal system works against citizens when their claims challenge official prerogatives. Despite the regime's recent emphasis on "building the rule of law," the government recently detained virtually all of China's rights-protection lawyers and indicated that it will try some of them for crimes such as "inciting subversion of state power."

China's Futures: PRC Elites Debate Economics, Politics, and Foreign Policy

by Daniel C. Lynch. Stanford University Press, 2015, 352 pp.

Most of what outside observers know about policy controversies in China revolves around the lopsided struggle between the entrenched authoritarian leadership and the small cadre of beleaguered dissidents who want human rights and constitutional democracy. But as Lynch reveals, there are real, if narrower, debates taking place inside the system, mostly among academics and think-tank staffers writing in policy journals and classified newsletters. On economics, much of the commentary runs counter to the regime's happy talk, pointing to problems such as an aging work force, the politicized allocation of credit, and government control of the land market. On international relations, by contrast, many specialists express what Lynch calls a "belle-epoque hubris," urging the government to be even more assertive than it already is. Commentators on domestic politics do not challenge one-party rule, but some call for more "inner-party democracy," while others view authoritarianism as...