Practicing transparency: Roles and ideologies of foreign lawyers in China's transitional economy.

摘要

This is a study of foreign lawyers working in China as China prepared to enter the WTO. Drawing on the jurisdictional theory of professions and translation theory, I examine how these legal professionals promote China's legal transformation in their daily practice, while establishing and maintaining a position of indispensability to clients. I begin my study by focusing on lawyers' work and how China's opaque legal environment causes lawyers to incorporate new methods into their daily practice and alter the roles they play for clients. Lawyers also change their ideology as they encounter restrictions on their legal practice. Lawyers respond to these restrictions by following, bending or violating the regulations. To justify these actions, lawyers adjust their understandings of what is law. Although lawyers display ideologies that appear to undermine their goal of a transparent legal system, they claim not to alter their understandings of ethics in this new environment, refusing to do ethically questionable work, even in the face of growing competition.; After examining lawyers' roles, business practices and ideologies, I focus on lawyers' efforts to become indispensable to clients and others in their network. This is done through strategic and semantic translation. Strategic translation occurs as lawyers define a problem, legal uncertainty, and claim a goal, transparency, held in common with clients and other actants and stake a key position helping others navigate China's legal environment and increase transparency. Semantic translation occurs during this process, as the diverse words lawyers and clients use to describe their problems and goals are altered into the common language of transparency. Lawyers also distinguish themselves from other providers of legal services to dissuade clients from using these alternatives to pursue transparency. They then expand their network, enlisting other actants to achieve the common goal of transparency. Through these translation processes, lawyers increase their importance to clients and others in the network, gaining power through these associations.