Understanding a legal system requires understanding of its legal service providers. The Chinese legal system has undergone major transformations since the late nineteenth century, and a series of approaches to regulating China’s lawyers has accompanied those transformations. This article offers a historical overview of those approaches, discussing the regulation of the Chinese legal profession and the foreign lawyers operating in the Chinese environment. The Chinese legal profession has never achieved significant self-regulation or autonomy from the state, and, during the Mao era (1949–1976) it was nearly obliterated. In the late 1970s, China began to rehabilitate its legal profession and create a space in which foreign law firms can operate legally. To a remarkable degree, that effort succeeded: Chinese law firms now operate around the world, and many major international firms operate successfully in China. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, there were signs that China’s leaders were willing to allow the legal system more autonomy and that part of that would comprise liberalizing the regulation of the legal profession. Instead, under Xi Jinping (China’s leader since 2012), political control over the Chinese legal profession has tightened, and foreign firms face new regulations that make it increasingly difficult for them to operate successfully. Going forward, Chinese firms might be supported to the extent they further the Xi regime’s economic aspirations, but they will be subject to closer oversight by the Chinese Communist Party. Foreign firms are no longer considered necessary for China’s economic rise, and they will be able to remain in China only if they are willing to abide by significant new restrictions.

About the Speaker:

John Ohnesorge is the George Young and Bascom Professor in Business Law at the University of Wisconsin Law School, where he teaches Administrative Law and Business Organizations, as well as seminars on compliance, law and economic development, and Chinese law. He is the director of the law school’s East Asian Legal Studies Center, and chaired the University of Wisconsin’s China Initiative from 2007 to 2011.  He has published extensively on issues related to law, development, and East Asia, and has taught and lectured throughout East and Southeast Asia, as well as in Brazil and in Europe.  He spent 2023 as a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar at Yonsei University, in Seoul, and in 2025 was a visiting scholar at Tokyo’s Chuo University.  Professor Ohnesorge received his B.A. from St. Olaf College (1985), his J.D. from the University of Minnesota Law School (1989), and his S.J.D. from Harvard Law School (2002), writing a dissertation on the importation and diffusion of Western administrative law in Northeast Asia.  He practiced law in Seoul for several years in the early 1990s, and from 2000 to 2001 clerked for Judge Rya W. Zobel of the Federal District Court for the District of Massachusetts.

*The Law Society of Hong Kong has awarded this seminar 1.5 Continuing Professional Development (CPD) points.