Christian Human Rights Lawyers in Authoritarian China: A Spiritual Capital and Social Capital Explanation

What motivates and sustains human rights lawyers under an authoritarian government? Previous research has pointed to higher income, prestigious social status, political embeddedness, and liberal values as important sources of motivation and coping strategies for lawyers in China. An intriguing phenomenon is that a very large proportion of China’s human rights lawyers are Protestant Christians. This article focuses on Chinese Christian lawyers through in-depth interviews and online materials of prominent human rights lawyers. To decipher the faith factor, we develop the concepts of religious and spiritual capital alongside human and social capital, especially articulating the distinctions of spiritual capital from religious capital and social capital. We find that the spiritual capital of perceived self-divine relationships compensates for the deficit or depletion of social capital among human rights lawyers.