Chapter 1The LawyerYang Bin was born wanting more. Her parents had wanted her to be like them: factory workers with a stable income, a guaranteed pension, and state-assigned housing. They both worked at a state-run auto parts factory that never closed even though it almost never turned a profit. But Yang was consumed by a gnawing sense that the purpose of her life could be bigger.
In person, she exudes energy: gregarious, with bright eyes and deep dimples that appear whenever she smiles or laughs (which is frequent), but her easy confidence was learned. As a young girl, she was shy and prone to blushing. She was born in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, a decade of political violence starting in the 1960s that killed at least an estimated half-million people, and she learned to value compliance. Growing up, her parents hinted darkly at previous purges under Chairman Mao Zedong, who ruled the Communist Party until his death in 1976. These tales taught her that standing out made one an easy target in the next political campaign that cropped up. At university, she chose what she thought would be the politically safest major: a now-nonexistent field of study called Building Chinese Socialism, an arcane discipline designed to study Deng Xiaoping’s famous phrase of creating a socialism “with Chinese characteristics.”
Yang had the good fortune to enter adulthood just after China was looking for a way to redefine itself post-Mao. Economic and political reforms begun in 1978 by Deng, a senior Party leader himself twice purged by Mao, meant people could choose their own jobs, if they dared, at the handful of new private businesses starting up. And so, after graduating in 1990, when Yang was offered a position to join her parents in the same factory danwei, or Communist work unit, she turned the offer down. Two decades ago, her actions would have been unimaginable, but she was of a new generation. “I did not want a life where I could already envision its ending,” she told me. While she didn’t exactly know what she wanted just yet, she did know with certainty that she was not going to find it in a Hunan provincial state company where “it is possible for a person to live and die in a ten-thousand-worker factory, from kindergarten to the mortuary home,” as she described it—the “iron rice bowl” of the socialist safety net.
Her search for adventure landed her in coastal Guangdong province, where her brother had already moved. It was a fortuitous choice. Yang quickly secured a job at a new, private pesticides factory. In the 1990s, in the heady days of China’s opening and reform policy, enormous financial opportunities were up for grabs after nearly four decades of strict ideological controls on the economy. Guangdong was in prime position to benefit given its proximity to the then-British colony of Hong Kong, where wealth and business acumen were plentiful. Guangdong’s massive port also made it an attractive location to place one of the country’s first economic pilot zones, where private businesses could set up and trade internationally, accelerating China’s economic opening.
When she was fired from the factory, which had sponsored her Guangdong residence papers, Yang couldn’t stomach the idea of returning home. One of the factory managers—a man she still calls her guardian angel—stepped in and arranged another job as a copy writer in a county-level prosecutor’s office. The job did not pay well, but it was a position in the civil service, coveted for its benefits and stability.
The job allowed her to reinvent herself. At the prosecutor’s office, it did not matter that she was the daughter of factory workers who had, just a few years earlier, been destined to be one herself; in Guangdong she could learn to be a servant of the law. She knew little then of the challenges ahead of her over the next four decades, and even if she did, she would not have changed her mind. Her career would put her on the front lines of a struggle to define a nascent Chinese system of law, to determine whose interests it fought for, and to decide what kind of country this system aspired to create. This was the purpose she had been looking for.
Yang started her career when much of China’s economic and Party system was up for reinvention, including the legal system. China wanted to build a more cosmopolitan legal system that governed by the rule of law. Controls on private businesses were lifting, and economic growth was booming after three decades of repressed demand. China would need fair courts and transparent laws to guide and contain this economic experiment. It also wanted to project itself as a modern country that was a safe destination for foreign investment. To do that, it needed a body of law to adjudicate disputes and train legal officials like Yang to enforce its rules.
The Party brought in foreign experts and talents and absorbed as much know-how as it could. “A considerable part of our rule of law construction achievements in the past 40 years have been achieved on the basis of absorbing foreign advanced experience,” Xiao Yang, a former president of China’s supreme court, wrote. In Hong Kong, a British-style common law system was already fairly developed, and Xiao sent more than two hundred Chinese judges to the former British colony to study international law. Several returned to China and became prominent judges. Far and away, however, it was admiration for the American system of constitutional law that dominated legal circles. Throughout the early 2000s, the Party sent dozens of mid-level cadres to Harvard University and Duke University each year, where they took classes with leading professors in political economy and constitutional law. Chinese scholars studied the U.S. system of checks and balances and the dynamics of the American Supreme Court. One member of China’s top court, Judge He Fan, went so far as to write an emotional tribute to conservative American Supreme Court justice Antony Scalia when the justice died.
China’s legal overhaul was crucial to making the case that the country was ready to join the global economic order. In 2001, China was granted admission to the World Trade Organization—the result of a years-long campaign to prove it could and would abide by international trade rules of fair competition, at least for a time. Unfortunately, intellectual property theft and counterfeiting were rampant, particularly in Guangdong province, where thousands of Chinese factories continue to manufacture much of the world’s consumer goods. Yang’s procuratorate office barely made a dent prosecuting trademark cases.
Instead, her office focused on underworld crime. China’s economic miracle had created an explosion in lawlessness. Crime was growing exponentially in the 1990s as people moved from their villages to expanding cities. Yang encountered horrific incidents as a state prosecutor. Gang violence had shot up; in coastal Fujian province, twelve young pirates, flashing explosives and knives, terrorized fishing boats until they were caught and executed. Authorities discovered a syndicate which smuggled in about 10 billion dollars in oil and cars over a period of three years. A rising Communist cadre named Xi Jinping was then the province’s deputy Party secretary. Thirteen years later, he would be anointed as Party secretary of the entire Communist Party as its top leader. In the midst of this uncertainty and chaos, Yang believed wholeheartedly in maintaining social order through a rigid application of the law, and she attacked her job with an activist’s zeal other bureaucrats found abrasive.
She was eager to get started, yet the first tasks assigned to her in the prosecutor’s office were deeply boring: filling out reams of court paperwork and writing transcripts. Her fellow officemates were generally unmotivated. They occasionally pulled out a mahjong table in the office during the afternoons and played the popular, tabletop game for the rest of the day. In a fit of pique in 1996, Yang quit and took a short break to pursue her dream of being a journalist, writing for a small, private newspaper before realizing the owner cared more about advertisement sales than reporting. Chastened, she went back to the procuratorate’s office, where she proved herself to be an ambitious prosecutor.
She impressed the right people. In 1997, Yang was promoted to assistant prosecutor, then delegated to the provincial office soon after, responsible for serious felonies and violent crimes. Not a natural public speaker, she was so overcome by nerves during her first case, she couldn’t hold her printed statement steady. But she loved the satisfaction of building a case, and she learned to embrace the exhilaration of addressing the court.
Her job gave her the power to change—or end—someone’s life. She made it a point to attend every execution in the cases she worked on. Five years into the job, Yang sent her first person to death row. She had been assigned the case of a man who had stabbed another man to death with a fruit knife. She encouraged the defendant to repent for those crimes and seek redemption.
Copyright © 2025 by Emily Feng. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
