This is not the job Zhou Long had in mind.

"When I was studying law in college, I never imagined that I would be selling pork after my graduation," said Zhou, 24, who works for a supermarket in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province. He received his bachelor's degree from the Southwest University of Political Science & Law last year.

Zhuang Lei, 24, graduated from Xuzhou Normal University in Jiangsu Province this year with a bachelor's degree in law. Although she tried her best to find a job related to the law in Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu, she is now a secretary at a small company in Suzhou.

Ministry of Education figures showed that last year China had more than 200,000 students studying for bachelor degrees in law at nearly 600 universities. About 66,000 working for their post-bachelor law degrees.

And according to a study by the All-China Youth Federation and Peking University, 62 per cent of this year's graduates with bachelor degrees in law failed to find jobs one of the lowest employment rates among the fields of study.

The situation has caused some people in the education and legal communities to call for a change in the way China trains its lawyers, prosecutors and judges.

For example, Zhu Chongshi, the president of Xiamen University in East China's Fujian Province, suggested that the school cancel the curriculum for a bachelor's degree in law.

"Because in reality people who hold bachelor's degrees are hardly ever engaged in law-related work after their graduation," he said.

Zhu says law professionals in China need higher degrees and cites the educational system used in the United States.

"Courses in law should be a basic requirement for undergraduate students, not an independent major in studies for a bachelor's degree," he said. "If students plan to become lawyers, judges or prosecutors, they should study law after holding a bachelor's degree in other majors."

One of the main issues is that China is producing too many law graduates with only bachelor's degrees, and many say the job market for them is simply too small. Another issue is that the legal community and educators from some of the more established law programmes believe many graduates from universities are not trained properly.

In fact, it is possible to pass the National Judicial Examination (NJE) to become a lawyer, a prosecutor or a judge in China with only a bachelor's degree. But even if it happens, the legal community is still unlikely to hire him or her without at least a master's degree.

Bachelor's degree holders can get a job, but these posts are mainly clerical positions at a law firm, a prosecutor's office or a court. To enter the legal profession in China, one generally needs to have earned at least a master's degree and to have passed the NJE to get the licence to practise law.

Another issue, that of unqualified holders of bachelor's degrees, is a delicate one. Many smaller institutions that are good at teaching other majors such as telecommunications and architecture have opened law departments in recent years with approval from the provincial or municipal government but not from the ministry.

"Figures on how law education programmes have developed so crazily in the past few years frighten me," wrote a law teacher at the Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, who identified himself only as "Tusheng Ageng" on his blog.

"Some teachers who have taught Chinese language and literature in the past have become judicial document teachers. If students are taught by these so-called law professors and teachers, how can we expect these graduates to become qualified lawyers, law teachers, judges or prosecutors?"

He criticized the schools for opening such new law departments, saying they were motivated by nothing more than money. He agreed with Zhu at Xiamen University, saying mere undergraduate degrees in law served no real purpose and should be eliminated.

An attempt to reach Tusheng Ageng for further discussion was unsuccessful.

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."

Good example

As the highest rated law school in China, the Peking University Law School has its work cut out to provide the country with enough high-level professionals who can compete in the international legal community.

"This is what we are doing now," Dean Zhu Suli said.

"More young tutors were added in postgraduate studies to teach the most advanced and up-to-date legal knowledge," he said.

Peking University has also started a postgraduate programme for foreign students to learn Chinese law in English.

In addition, the school's master's programme, which began in China in 1995 learning from the US educational system, has added more legal specialities including financial law, intellectual property law, international business law and criminal law.

The results so far seem encouraging, Zhu said. "The employment rate for law master's graduates at our school was 98 per cent this year."

The reason for the school's success, in his opinion, is its goal of training students to be not merely lawyers, judges and prosecutors, but also top-ranking jurists, politicians and high-level officials in companies.

Graduates from the school, he said, "should have a comprehensive knowledge, an independent personality, an independent academic spirit and systematic legal knowledge. It is not just a training organization for lawyers."

(China Daily 10/10/2006 page1)