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How did China’s Cultural Revolution affect the role of lawyers?
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Legal ethics
Illustration by Hablot Knight Browne for Charles Dickens's Bleak House. Here Lady Dedlock is visited by her cunning old lawyer, who discovers her deepest secret and threatens to reveal it to her husband.
During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), the role of lawyers and the legal profession in China was effectively dismantled. The movement, led by Mao Zedong, rejected the idea that law could possess integrity or a function independent of politics.1
The Cultural Revolution had several devastating effects on the legal system:
- Attack on Expertise: Legally trained personnel were targeted as reactionary, and the belief that law should operate apart from political objectives was suppressed.1
- Closure of Institutions: Courts were largely closed, and the national legislature ceased to function.12
- Loss of Personnel: By the end of the period in 1976, the country was left with fewer than 3,000 lawyers, all of whom had been trained at least a decade earlier in disparate legal traditions.2
- Erosion of Rule of Law: The legal system was replaced by an environment where political campaigns and class struggle took precedence over established legal procedures.1
It was not until the late 1970s, under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, that China began to reestablish its legal institutions and rebuild the profession to support a market-oriented economy.23