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Criminal Defense in China studies empirically the everyday work and political mobilization of defense lawyers in China. It builds upon 329 interviews across China, and other social science methods, to investigate and analyze the interweaving of politics and practice in five segments of the practicing criminal defense bar in China from 2005 to 2015. This book is the first to examine everyday criminal defense work in China as a political project. The authors engage extensive scholarship on lawyers and political liberalism across the world, from seventeenth-century Europe to late twentieth-century Korea and Taiwan, drawing on theoretical propositions from this body of theory to examine the strategies and constraints of lawyer mobilization in China. The book brings a fresh perspective through its focus on everyday work and ordinary lawyering in an authoritarian context and raises searching questions about law and lawyers, politics and society, in China's uncertain future.

Abstract
In his book on legal reform in China after Mao, Stanley B. Lubman adopted the metaphor "bird in a cage" to describe the status of Chinese law at the turn of the twenty-first century. This article offers some general reflections on the social transformation of Chinese law since 1999, with the objective of explaining (1) how the legal bird has become a cage, and (2) how this new legal cage has been used to trap birds in Chinese society. It first traces the transformation of the legal bird into a cage in China's reform era and then tells the stories of four species of birds currently confined in the legal cage, namely, hawks (state officials), crows (rights activists), sparrows (netizens), and ostriches (ordinary citizens). Laws related to the four species are concerned with combating corruption, political stability, internet control, and everyday life, respectively. By focusing on the four species of birds in the legal cage, this article offers a fresh understanding of how law interacts with various individuals and social groups in Chinese society and a sociolegal explanation of the social transformation of China's legal system from 1999 to 2019.

Sociologists often imagine society as spaces, yet how social spaces are related remains ambiguous in most theories. In developing his field theory, Bourdieu used extensively the concept of homology to describe the structural similarities across fields, but he had not taken seriously the spaces between fields or how fields are related to each other. Adopting the Simmelian approach of formal sociology, this article outlines six basic social forms by which social spaces are related. It argues that relations between social spaces can be understood along two dimensions: heterogeneity and social distance. In terms of heterogeneity, social spaces can be kindred, symbiotic or oppositional. In terms of social distance, they can be linked, nested or overlapping. These social forms of interspatial relations are constituted by the boundary work of a variety of actors, including guardians, brokers and space travellers. The article provides a general vocabulary for thinking about how social spaces are related and how they interact across boundaries.

The sociology of professions has derived most of its theories from empirical cases in the Global North. Despite the growing number of empirical studies on professionals in developing countries, the intersection between professions and development has rarely been theorized. This article uses the case of legal services professionals in China to outline an ecological theory of professions and development. It argues that, in the Global South, professions and development are overlapping ecologies that share some common actors and transform by similar social processes. Professionals occupy at least four different positions in the ecology of development: as facilitators of global institutional diffusion, as delegates of the nation-state, as brokers between global and national market institutions, and as activists of local social resistance. In the process of development, those four types of professionals are often in conflict, and the ecology of professions differentiates among them by means of their social interactions in issue areas such as economic growth, access to justice, and human rights.

AbstractIn China's legal services market, lawyers face strong competition from a variety of alternative legal service providers. Based upon 256 interviews with law practitioners and public officials, three years of ethnographic work on a professional internet forum, and extensive archival research, this article develops a theory of symbiotic exchange to analyse the competition between lawyers, basic-level legal workers and other practitioners in ordinary legal work, as well as how the state regulates these competing occupational groups. It argues that the dynamics of professional competition in the Chinese legal services market can be explained by the symbiotic exchange between law practitioners in the market and their regulatory agencies and officials in the state. Chinese lawyers have a weak market position because their exchange with the state is often not as strong and stable as their competitors. The prevalence of symbiotic exchange leads to the structural isomorphism between market and state institutions in China's transitional economy.