China has 121,889 lawyers, 31,957 legal assistants and 12,428 law offices, but parts of the country still have no legal services, says an official with the All-China Lawyers Association.

Yu Ning, director of the All China Lawyers Association, told a forum marking the association's 20th anniversary, that since the reform of legal services was launched in the early 1980s, the number of lawyers had risen along with professional standards.

Association statistics show that over the past 20 years, nearly 30 percent of law school graduates have passed the national judiciary exam to qualify as lawyers.

Sixty percent of Chinese lawyers had at least a bachelor of law degree, and ten percent had a masters degree or doctorate. The other 30 percent passed the national judiciary exam at times in China's past when university education was suspended.

However, the proportion of lawyers to the total population was just 0.9 per 100,000, far lower than most Western countries, according to a report on Lawyer Law implementation inspection last October.

Most lawyers worked in the metropolitan areas of east China, leaving underdeveloped western areas with a shortage of professional legal services, including 206 counties with no lawyers.

Justice Minister Wu Aiying said at the forum that the pursuit of judicial justice was a duty for lawyers, who should have a high sense of responsibility for litigants and society and be self-disciplined.

Seventy-one senior lawyers were honored at the forum for making a special contribution to the profession.

Source: Xinhua