About All China Lawyers Association

All China Lawyers Association

The All China Lawyers Association, commonly abbreviated ACLA, is the official national professional association for lawyers in the People's Republic of China. Founded at the first National Lawyers' Congress in Beijing on 7 July 1986, it is headquartered in Beijing and operates under the Ministry of Justice, which is listed as its parent organisation. The association's official website is acla.org.cn. As China's sole national bar association, it carries out professional administration over lawyers alongside the judicial administrative authorities, and membership is compulsory for practising lawyers, who register with the ACLA or with its provincial and municipal counterparts. By the mid-2020s China counted more than 600,000 practising lawyers, and scholarly studies commonly cite a figure approaching 600,000 lawyers working across a wide variety of fields, all of them organised within the association system that the ACLA heads.

The ACLA was created at a specific moment in the rebuilding of China's legal system. After the lawyer system was restored in 1979, the association became the institutional home of a profession that was moving, over the following decades, from state employment towards private practice, while remaining under strong oversight from both the Ministry of Justice and the association itself. Its journal, China Lawyer, has been published since 1987, and its committees, training programmes and rights-protection work have made it one of the most studied professional bodies in Chinese law, featuring in research by Harvard Law School, Human Rights in China and other academic and professional observers.

Origins in the restoration of the lawyer system

The ACLA cannot be understood apart from the reconstruction of the Chinese legal profession after 1978. The Ministry of Justice's own history of the profession records that the lawyer system was restored in 1979, after a long gap during which the earlier lawyer system had been dismantled. In August 1980 the Standing Committee of the Fifth National People's Congress passed the Interim Regulations of the People's Republic of China on Lawyers, described by the ministry as the first legislation on China's lawyer system since the founding of the People's Republic. Those interim regulations, which took effect on 1 January 1982, re-established lawyers as a recognised legal occupation and introduced a licensing examination and a lawyer registration system.

The next steps came quickly. In April 1986 the Ministry of Justice promulgated its notice on the lawyer qualification examination, introducing a nationwide standardised qualification examination earlier, scholars note, than equivalent examinations for judges and prosecutors. In July of the same year a unified qualification examination for the lawyer profession was launched, and on 7 July 1986 — dated 17 July 1986 in the Ministry of Justice timeline — the first National Lawyers' Congress met in Beijing and founded the All China Lawyers Association. From its founding, the association participated in the administration of the lawyer profession alongside the judicial administrative authorities, rather than standing wholly apart from the state as an independent bar in the Anglo-American sense.

Legal basis and the Lawyers Law

The association's position was progressively written into law. The decisive step was the Lawyers Law of 1996, which gave lawyers' associations a statutory chapter of their own and framed their role in professional self-governance, discipline and the protection of lawyers' lawful rights. Under that framework, the ACLA and the local lawyers' associations are the self-governing organisations of the profession, while the Ministry of Justice and local justice bureaus retain administrative supervision. Every practising lawyer in China is required to belong to a lawyers' association, and law firms are likewise organised within the system.

Later amendments to the association's own charter reflected the political development of the profession. Under the general secretaryship of Xi Jinping, Xi Jinping Thought was added to the association's charter, and party-building provisions were incorporated into its governing documents. In November 2017, as Xinhua reported, a Communist Party committee for lawyers across China was set up with the approval of the Organisation Department of the CPC Central Committee, on a decision of the Leading Party Members' Group of the Ministry of Justice. The ACLA reported at the time that party organisations had been established by lawyers' associations in 31 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities, as well as the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, and that the number of party members who are lawyers had grown from 44,000 at the end of 2008 to more than 102,000.

Structure, membership and local associations

The ACLA sits at the apex of a nationwide hierarchy. Below it stand provincial-level lawyers' associations for each province, autonomous region and municipality, and below them municipal and local associations through which individual lawyers register and practise. Membership is compulsory: in addition to maintaining a licence to practise, all lawyers in China are required to register with the All China Lawyers Association or its municipal and local counterparts. The association is therefore both a membership body and an instrument of professional administration, a dual character that academic studies of the Chinese bar repeatedly emphasise.

The scale of that membership has grown with the profession itself. Early studies cited by Human Rights in China discussed a profession of more than 250,000 lawyers; by the early 2020s, accounts of the lawyer system described nearly 600,000 lawyers, and the clean candidate record for this profile puts the figure at over 600,000 practising lawyers by the mid-2020s. The ACLA's national congresses elect its council and leadership, and its presidents have included Zou Zhongxian, Gao Zongze, Yu Ning, Wang Junfeng and Gao Zicheng. Wang Junfeng, a prominent corporate lawyer, served as president during the period when the national party committee for lawyers was established in 2017, and is listed as president in reference summaries of the association.

Committees and the protection of lawyers' rights

Much of the ACLA's practical work is done through its special committees, which cover substantive areas of practice and professional issues. One of its six special committees most often cited in the literature is the Committee for the Protection of Lawyers' Lawful Rights, described in reference sources as the largest committee, playing an increasingly important role in protecting lawyers' rights and interests. The existence of such a committee reflects a recurring problem in Chinese legal practice: lawyers facing obstruction, threats or interference when representing clients, and turning to their association for institutional support.

Other committees address fields such as human rights and constitutional law. The Beijing-based lawyer Mo Shaoping, for example, is recorded as a member of the Human Rights and Constitutional Law Committee of the All China Lawyers Association, an illustration of how the committee structure brings together practitioners working on sensitive public-law questions. Harvard Law School's Center on the Legal Profession has examined how Chinese lawyers use networks and lawyers' associations both to engage with the state and, at times, to press for change, noting that for a long time the bar played a comparatively passive role, primarily issuing licences, guiding lawyers and collecting membership fees, before taking on more active functions.

Training, qualification and professional standards

Professional formation is a second core function. Even before the ACLA was established in 1986, a lawyer vocational education system was under consideration in connection with the coming Lawyers Law. Training was later divided into two streams: apprentice or trainee lawyers, who undergo vocational training before holding an official post, and practising lawyers, who are subject to continuing, effectively lifelong, vocational training. A 1997 notice from the Ministry of Justice on further normalising lawyer training set concrete provisions for the training of practising lawyers, supplying new knowledge and ideas intended to raise professional skills.

The qualification gateway itself dates from the association's founding year. The nationwide lawyer qualification examination introduced in 1986 standardised entry to the profession across the country, replacing purely local or administrative routes. Within the association system, qualification, registration, annual practice requirements and continuing training together form the machinery by which the ACLA and the justice authorities jointly regulate who may practise law in China and under what professional obligations.

Discipline and professional self-governance

Self-governance in the Chinese system includes discipline. The Lawyers Law framework assigns lawyers' associations responsibility for professional ethics and discipline, including investigating complaints against lawyers and imposing association-level sanctions, alongside the administrative penalties that justice bureaus may impose. This shared model — association discipline plus state administrative supervision — is the feature of the Chinese bar most often contrasted with fully independent bars elsewhere, and it is central to scholarly debates about the independence of lawyers in China, including the analysis published by Human Rights in China on the respective roles of justice bureaus and lawyers' associations.

Local associations have at times been the source of controversial professional rules. Human Rights in China, for instance, recorded that on 19 March 2014 the Beijing lawyers' association issued a guideline including provisions prohibiting lawyers from publishing their defence arguments and other legal documents related to a case before a court announced a verdict. Such episodes are cited in the literature as evidence of the tension within the association system between protecting lawyers and controlling them, a tension that runs through the ACLA's modern history.

Publications and professional discourse

The association's journal, China Lawyer, has been published since 1987, one year after the ACLA's founding, and serves as the profession's national magazine, carrying practice guidance, policy discussion and professional news for lawyers across the country. Through China Lawyer and its other publications and conferences, the association provides the main nationwide forum in which the Chinese legal profession discusses its own development, from the restoration-era debates of the 1980s to later questions of commercial practice, public-interest law and the profession's social role.

The ACLA also figures prominently in the academic literature on Chinese law. Studies published through Harvard Law School, the journal Archives de philosophie du droit and Chinese legal-science journals trace the profession's development over more than forty years, from the 1980 interim regulations through the unified qualification examination to the present system of laws, registration and association governance — a system in which the ACLA is a central, permanent institution.

International exchanges

The association has hosted international bar exchanges since the 1990s. In August 1998, the American Bar Association offered to assist the All-China Lawyers Association in preparing an independent bar, an episode recorded in the ABA's own China law handbook and frequently cited in discussions of foreign engagement with the Chinese legal profession. Cooperation with the American Bar Association dating from 1998 formed part of a broader pattern of exchanges through which the ACLA engaged with foreign bars, law societies and rule-of-law programmes during China's decades of legal construction and opening.

Those exchanges have always operated within the association's defined position in the Chinese system: a people's organisation and official professional association under the Ministry of Justice, rather than an independent regulator. International counterparts therefore engage the ACLA simultaneously as the representative body of more than half a million Chinese lawyers and as an institution of the Chinese party-state's legal order — a duality that defines both its domestic authority and its external relations.

The association in the Xi Jinping era

In the Xi Jinping era the association's charter was amended to include party-building provisions and to incorporate Xi Jinping Thought, formalising the Communist Party's leadership within the profession's national body. The 2017 establishment of a national party committee for lawyers, described by the ACLA's then president Wang Junfeng as an important measure to implement the spirit of the 19th National Congress of the CPC and to push forward reform of the legal industry, extended that structure across the profession. Party organisations within law firms and local associations were to be guided and improved under the new committee's rules.

At the same time, the ordinary machinery of the association — registration, training, committees, discipline and the China Lawyer journal — has continued to expand with the profession itself. With China's lawyers now numbering over 600,000 and working, as one recent study puts it, across a variety of fields within a relatively complete system of laws and regulations, a unified qualification examination and lawyers' associations, the All China Lawyers Association remains the indispensable national institution of the Chinese bar, nearly four decades after the first National Lawyers' Congress founded it in Beijing in July 1986.