Gao Zongze, former chairman of the All China Lawyers' Association and senior
partner of the law firm King & Wood in Beijing, was outspoken as to where he
thought blame for the current situation lay.
"The Ministry of Education should be responsible for unqualified law
graduates as it has failed to fulfil its obligation to supervise the development
of law schools," Gao told China Daily.
"It is wrong that every industrial university and college has a law
department."
Voice of dissent
Zhu Suli, dean of the Peking University Law School rated the best in China
for its postgraduate studies disagreed that bachelor's degree programmes in law
should be discontinued. Such a degree indicates not only a level of professional
training achieved, he said, but also a comprehensive quality education.
It should be the market, not the government, which determines whether or not
to adjust China's legal educational system, he added.
If making money through substandard programmes was an issue, even if all
bachelor's degree in law programmes were stopped, there would be nothing to stop
the same universities from establishing master's and doctoral programmes and
charging even higher tuition fees for them, Zhu said.
"I do not deny there are problems in the current legal education system, but
the correct solution is to improve the system to readdress the shortcomings
rather than abandon the bachelor programme.
"A law school boom in recent years simply meets the requirements of social
development and reflects the transformation of the economic system."
As for the inability of bachelor's degree holders to find jobs, Zhu said they
haven't been looking in the right places. "Although there are a lot of law
graduates in China, few are willing to work in developing areas," he pointed
out.
He said he knows of a county-level court in Shaanxi Province that does not
have even one university graduate who majored in law. The Tibet Autonomous
Region needs about 2,000 judges, he said, and so do other western provinces and
autonomous regions.
"Law graduates all want to work in big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai,"
Zhu said.
He said the country should encourage more law graduates to go to
poverty-stricken areas, especially in western China, to engage in legal work
there.
As a supporter of the bachelor's degree in law system, Zhu said he did not
see the point of students getting a bachelor's degree in another subject, then
trying for a postgraduate degree in law for the sake of changing to a more
lucrative field of study or a better university.
"The (initial) four-year education is wasted," he said.
That's why the Peking University Law School encourages law applicants to
relate their undergraduate degrees to their postgraduate education.
"For those who learned accounting as undergraduates, we encourage them to
study related areas of law such as tax law in their postgraduate studies," he
said.
Overall, however, although Zhu did not want to apportion blame for what he
called the "abnormal development" of the system, he said that unless the problem
is resolved, "I believe that China's law education will suffer a defeat in the
coming years."
