Abstract
Figuring prominently in prevailing portraits of activism and political contention in contemporary China are weiquan [rights defense] lawyers. Outside of China, the word weiquan emerged in the early 2000s and had achieved near-hegemonic status by the late 2000s as a descriptive label for a corps of activist lawyers—who numbered between several dozen and several hundred—committed to the cause and mobilizing in pursuit of human rights protections vis-à-vis China’s authoritarian party-state. This article challenges the dominant nomenclature of Chinese activism, in which weiquan in general and weiquan lawyers in particular loom large. A semantic history of the word weiquan, traced through an analysis of four decades of officially sanctioned rights discourse, reveals its politically legitimate origins in the official lexicon of the party-state. Unique survey data collected in 2009 and 2015 demonstrate that Chinese lawyers generally understood the word in terms of the party-state’s official language of rights, disseminated through its ongoing public legal education campaign. Because the officially-sanctioned meaning of weiquan, namely “to protect citizens’ lawful rights and interests,” is consistent with the essential professional responsibility of lawyers, fully half of a sample of almost 1,000 practicing lawyers from across China self-identified as weiquan lawyers. Such a massive population of self-identified weiquan lawyers—approximately 80,000 in 2009 assuming that the sample is at least reasonably representative—makes sense only if local meanings of the term profoundly diverge from its dominant English-language representations. Concluding speculations consider and call for further research on why this word was appropriated and redefined by activist Chinese lawyers in the first place.
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have