China Human Rights Lawyers ─ Advocacy and Resistance

This book offers a unique insight into the role of human rights lawyers in Chinese law and politics. In her extensive portrait of human rights lawyers, Eva Pils highlights how these practitioners are important as legal advocates for victims of injustice, and as proponents of legal and political change in China. Drawing from hundreds of anonymised conversations, the book examines how bureaucratic systems of control operate to subdue and marginalise human rights lawyers, and observes how such lawyers challenge the system.

The book analyses in detail human rights lawyers' experiences of repression at the hands of the police and state security apparatus, along with the intellectual, political and moral resources they draw upon. Key concerns include the impact of human rights lawyers on legal practice, the interaction between bureaucratic, professional and social environments, and the resistance of repression and its long term political impact. In addressing these issues, Pils offers a rare perspective in the evaluation of China's legal and political system, and offers new ways to assess domestic advocacy's challenges to international human rights.

This book will be of great interest and use to students and scholars of law, Chinese studies, political studies, international relations, and sociology. It is also addressed to people working in the fields of human rights advocacy, law, politics, international relations, and journalism.

Eva Pils is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the Chinese University Hong Kong. Her scholarship focuses on human rights and China, with publications addressing the role and situation of Chinese human rights defenders, property law and land rights in China, the status of migrant workers, the Chinese petitioning system and conceptions of justice in China.