This book project examines how lawyers, judges, prosecutors, legal aid workers, and grassroots legal service providers mediate the relationship between state authority and citizen grievance in contemporary China. Rather than treating law under authoritarianism as either empty repression or gradual liberalization, the manuscript argues that regimes govern through legal intermediaries who can solve problems, contain conflict, and lend institutional credibility to rule without democratizing it.
At the center of the book is a simple argument: authoritarian legality works by delegation. The state relies on legal professionals to absorb grievances, translate law into everyday problem-solving, and stage a credible image of justice, while retaining the power to define which claims remain governable and which claims become politically unacceptable. In this sense, lawyers are not outside the regime’s governing apparatus; they are one of the mechanisms through which authoritarian rule is made durable, flexible, and socially legible.
Drawing on interviews, participatory observation, archival research, online ethnography, and experimental evidence, the project explains how delegated legality works in practice. The manuscript is based on my dissertation but expands it into a broader account of authoritarian legality: how states enlist legal professionals to deliver justice selectively, how professional incentives shape the boundaries of legal help, and why meaningful legal empowerment remains fragile when citizens and legal elites cannot build durable mutual trust.
Core Argument
The book’s central claim is that authoritarian states do not merely repress through law; they govern through legal brokers. By delegating legal aid, consultation, dispute handling, and symbolic problem-solving to lawyers and other legal professionals, the state can extend its reach into everyday grievances while preserving distance from the social costs of selective justice. This arrangement creates a form of authoritarian legality that is real enough to solve routine disputes and produce compliance, but too politically bounded to sustain robust rights-claiming against the regime itself.
- Authoritarian states delegate legal intermediation to professionals in order to draw on expertise, absorb blame, and project rule-of-law legitimacy.
- That legality is politically bounded: professional oversight, market incentives, and political risk limit lawyers’ capacity to help citizens challenge the state.
- Routine and regime-compatible claims receive more facilitation than sensitive, collective, or politically threatening demands.
- Durable legal empowerment depends on reciprocal trust between citizens and legal professionals, a coalition that is difficult to sustain under authoritarian rule.
Evidence Base
- Interviews and field interactions with citizens, lawyers, judges, judicial officials, bar association members, and grassroots legal workers.
- An audit study of roughly 3,000 calls to city-level 12348 legal aid hotlines.
- Twenty-plus weeks embedded in the rural village lawyer program across 70 villages in Henan.
- Parallel survey experiments with more than 1,500 citizens and 1,200 legal professionals.
Empirical Strategy
- 12348 hotline audit study. A city-level audit experiment that randomizes caller profiles and legal demands to trace how state-provided legal advice varies across routine, distributive, and politically sensitive cases.
- Embedded fieldwork in the village lawyer program. Participatory observation and on-the-ground shadowing of lawyers who deliver legal education and consultation in rural Henan.
- Parallel survey experiments. Citizen and lawyer surveys that test which messages, professional norms, and expectations can make legal mobilization effective under weak rule-of-law conditions.
Fieldwork I: Hotline Governance and Delegated Justice
The hotline study shows how legal aid operates as a selective interface between the state and aggrieved citizens. Official protocols encourage lawyers to provide substantive guidance in routine matters while treating sensitive collective disputes as problems to be stabilized, defused, or redirected.
Fieldwork II: Village Lawyering in Rural Henan
The village lawyer fieldwork follows how legal knowledge is translated into everyday outreach. Lawyers and local legal workers teach residents, distribute printed materials, and provide consultations that are useful for ordinary disputes yet often stop short of encouraging confrontational claims against authorities.
Field images are presented for research illustration; identifying details have been blurred where needed.