Chinese lawyers offer coaching for when corruption busters come knocking

Zhang Dongdong has been fielding ever more requests for legal advice from jittery entrepreneurs, nervous government officials or their desperate relatives.

They usually do not tell him the whole story, and sometimes say it happened “to a friend”, but most want to know the same thing: what to do when they are targeted by China’s corruption busters.

“Some had received a tip-off that they were being investigated, some got a call from disciplinary inspectors asking them to cooperate, but in most of the cases, the suspects had already been held by disciplinary authorities, and their families came to us,” said Zhang, a partner at Beijing Han Heng Law Firm.

“We even ran into some extreme cases. Once, someone who had given bribes agreed to cooperate after being promised that they wouldn’t be investigated, but the authorities went back on their word after the bribe-taker was sentenced. In the most serious case, the client died after being taken into custody and the family came to us.”