Infrastructural developmental citizenship: Chinese lawyers and state-framed marketization

China’s judicial system supports state-led developmentalism, whereby recently reinstated lawyers are expected to concentrate their practice on servicing marketized economic activities for the sake of national economic development. In other words, contemporary Chinese lawyers, as part of the legal infrastructure for the increasingly marketized economy, are practically required to be developmental lawyers, so they broadly share the developmental citizenship of most Chinese citizens. Such status of Chinese lawyers corresponds to the overall systemic order of China as a post-socialist state in which socio-economic liberalization has been advanced for developmental purposes without attendant political liberalization (that is, reforming the party-state dictatorship). While most lawyers have managed to survive or succeed in the context of such developmental instrumentality, their professional authority and integrity in upholding the rule of law have been chronically compromised by both the economic order that remains state-segmented and the political discouragement of civil rights advocacy.