China's economic reform has brought waves of labor disputes between workers and management over a wide range of issues, from job contracts, wages, benefits, pensions and unemployment compensation to working conditions.1 The majority of the disputes are caused by management's encroachment of workers' rights. Workers have few countervailing means in the face of this. Such asymmetrical power relations partly result from state policy. In pushing for market-driven industrial restructuring, the state grants managers extensive powers, which are often abused, but denies workers the right to independent organizations to counterbalance the powers of management. Despite this asymmetry, workers' efforts at redressing their grievances are increasing. While protests have become widespread across the country, a growing number of workers are also seeking justice through law suits.2 This phenomenon can be attributed to the growth of awareness of rights in a society that has begun to stress the rule of law. Workers' legal actions occur within this same general context, but the workers' actions differ somewhat from other citizens' litigation against government bureaucrats or peasants' lawsuits against rural cadres. Legal action in those instances, whether by an individual or by a group of people, is largely taken by claimants without the backing of any organization. However, in many cases of workers' law suits, trade unions play an active role in providing legal aid to the workers and pursuing settlements in their favor. Other government organs, such as labor bureaus, arbitration committees, and Letters and Visits Offices,3 as well as NGOs and private law firms, are also involved in offering assistance to workers. But the unions' provision of legal aid is significant in that it has been adopted as a deliberate strategy to protect labor rights by an organization that has been belittled by foreign analysts. The stereotypical image of the official Chinese trade union-the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) and its branches at various levels-is that it is an instrument of the state designed to control industrial workers and that it is powerless when it comes to defending workers' interests. Yet union involvement in legal contentions on behalf of workers indicates that the ACFTU, China's sole lawful labor organization, is asserting a role in labor disputes, even though the basic pattern of its relationship with the state remains largely unchanged. Unions are pressing hard in workers' legal cases, representing them on arbitration committees or in court, provoking public discourse on the labor rights issue, and promoting pro-labor legislation. Although the unions' active legal role cannot significantly change labor's weak position in an emerging market economy, it constitutes part of a labor struggle in China despite the country's entrenched one-party rule that precludes autonomous, independently organized labor movements. In the Western literature, two types of legal mobilization can be identified. One involves individuals seeking resolution of "private" disputes,4 with an aim to win an immediate redress for perceived injustice. It routinely occurs in a society with a sound legal system. The other type refers to the ways in which organized movements seek broad changes in public policies and social practices. In this instance, law becomes a critical resource that movement activists mobilize to advance movement goals.5 Litigation and other legal tactics are flexible tools that enable activists to employ existing statutes to challenge the status quo.6 Despite their differences, in both types of legal mobilization the existing legal conventions provide some of the most important "strategies of action" through which citizens routinely navigate.7 Although sharing certain characteristics of both of these two types, legal mobilization by Chinese trade unions does not exactly correspond with either. Most legal action arising from labor disputes originates with individual workers through litigation aiming to redress their private grievances. …