Code, Custom, and Legal Practice in China

Code, Custom, and Legal Practice in China
Author: Philip C. Huang
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2001
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0804741115

What changes occurred and what remained the same in Chinese civil justice from the Qing to the Republic? Drawing on archival records of actual cases, this study provides a new understanding of late imperial and Republican Chinese law. It also casts a new light on Chinese law by emphasizing rural areas and by comparing the old and the new.

Circulating the Code

Circulating the Code
Author: Ting Zhang
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2020-04-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 029574717X

Contrary to longtime assumptions about the insular nature of imperial China’s legal system, Circulating the Code demonstrates that in the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) most legal books were commercially published and available to anyone who could afford to buy them. Publishers not only extended circulation of the dynastic code and other legal texts but also enhanced the judicial authority of case precedents and unofficial legal commentaries by making them more broadly available in convenient formats. As a result, the laws no longer represented privileged knowledge monopolized by the imperial state and elites. Trade in commercial legal imprints contributed to the formation of a new legal culture that included the free flow of accurate information, the rise of nonofficial legal experts, a large law-savvy population, and a high litigation rate. Comparing different official and commercial editions of the Qing Code, popular handbooks for amateur legal practitioners, and manuals for community legal lectures, Ting Zhang demonstrates how the dissemination of legal information transformed Chinese law, judicial authority, and popular legal consciousness.

A Question of Intent

A Question of Intent
Author: Jennifer M. Neighbors
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2018-04-17
Genre: Law
ISBN: 900433016X

In A Question of Intent: Homicide Law and Criminal Justice in Qing and Republican China, Jennifer M. Neighbors uses legal cases from the local, provincial and central levels to explore both the complexity with which Qing law addressed abstract concepts and the process of adoption, adaptation, and resistance as late imperial law gave way to criminal law of the Republican period. This study reveals a Chinese justice system, both before and after 1911, that defies assignment to binary categories of modern and pre-modern law that have influenced much of past scholarship.

Civil Law in Qing and Republican China

Civil Law in Qing and Republican China
Author:
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 358
Release: 1994-08
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0804779279

The opening of local archives to Western scholars in the 1980's has provided the basis for this reexamination of civil law in Qing and Republican China. This pathbreaking volume demonstrates that, contrary to previous scholarly understanding, Qing and Republican courts dealt extensively with such civil matters as land rights, debt, marriage, and inheritance, and did so with striking consistency and in conformity with the written code.

Chinese Law

Chinese Law
Author: Li Chen
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 410
Release: 2015-01-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 900428849X

The twelve case studies in Chinese Law: Knowledge, Practice and Transformation, 1530s to 1950s, edited by Li Chen and Madeleine Zelin, open a new window onto the historical foundation and transformation of Chinese law and legal culture in late imperial and modern China. Their interdisciplinary analyses provide valuable insights into the multiple roles of law and legal knowledge in structuring social relations, property rights, popular culture, imperial governance, and ideas of modernity; they also provide insight into the roles of law and legal knowledge in giving form to an emerging revolutionary ideology and to policies that continue to affect China to the present day.

The Tradition and Modern Transition of Chinese Law

The Tradition and Modern Transition of Chinese Law
Author: Jinfan Zhang
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 719
Release: 2014-02-20
Genre: Law
ISBN: 3642232663

The book was first published in 1997, and was awarded the first prize of scientific research by the Ministry of Justice during the ninth Five-Year Plan of China. In 2005, it was adopted the text book for the postgraduates of law majors. In 2009, it was awarded the second prize of the best books on law in China. The book discusses from different aspects the long legal tradition in China, and it not only helps us to have a further understanding of Chinese legal system but also combines theories and practice and illustrate the modern legal transition which probes the history of Chinese legal system. As is known to us all, China is a country with a long legal history, which can be traced back to more than three thousand year ago. So the legal tradition of China has been passed down from generation to generation without any interruptions. This feature is peculiar to Chinese legal history which is beyond all comparison with that of other countries such as ancient Egypt, ancient India, ancient Babylon and ancient Persia. Through the study of Chinese legal history we can have a deeper understanding of the histories, features, origins and the transition of Chinese legal tradition. The Chinese legal tradition originated from China, and it is the embodiment of the wisdom and creativity of Chinese civilization. The great many books, researching materials, legal constitutions, archives, files and records of different dynasties in China have provided us with rare, complete and systematic materials to research. The book has a complete, systematic and detailed research on Chinese legal tradition and its transition and it gives people a correct recognition of the process of the perfection of laws during its development and its position as well as its value in the social progress in order to grasp its regular patterns. It also has showed us the most valuable part and core of Chinese legal Tradition and it is a summary of Chinese legal tradition and its transition from different perspectives, different angles and different levels. From the book, we can see that the ancient Chinese Legal Culture had once shocked the world and exerted great influence on the civilization of the world legal system, especially the legal systems in Asian countries. The book also has discussed the reestablishment of law in the late Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the Chinese law’s transition to modernity. In a word, the book has not only combined the legal system and the legal culture together, but also integrated the important historical figures and events ingeniously and it is a valuable and readable book with authenticity.

Civil Justice in China

Civil Justice in China
Author: Philip C. C. Huang
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 1996
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780804734691

To what extent do newly available case records bear out our conventional assumptions about the Qing legal system? Is it true, for example, that Qing courts rarely handled civil lawsuits--those concerned with disputes over land, debt, marriage, and inheritance--as official Qing representations led us to believe? Is it true that decent people did not use the courts? And is it true that magistrates generally relied more on moral predilections than on codified law in dealing with cases? Based in large part on records of 628 civil dispute cases from three counties from the 1760’s to the 1900’s, this book reexamines those widely accepted Qing representations in the light of actual practice. The Qing state would have had us believe that civil disputes were so "minor” or "trivial” that they were left largely to local residents themselves to resolve. However, case records show that such disputes actually made up a major part of the caseloads of local courts. The Qing state held that lawsuits were the result of actions of immoral men, but ethnographic information and case records reveal that when community/kin mediation failed, many common peasants resorted to the courts to assert and protect their legitimate claims. The Qing state would have had us believe that local magistrates, when they did deal with civil disputes, did so as mediators rather than judges. Actual records reveal that magistrates almost never engaged in mediation but generally adjudicated according to stipulations in the Qing code.

Heaven Has Eyes

Heaven Has Eyes
Author: Xiaoqun Xu
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2020-08-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190060050

Heaven Has Eyes is a comprehensive but concise history of Chinese law and justice from the imperial era to the post-Mao era. Never before has a single book treated the traditional Chinese law and judicial practices and their modern counterparts as a coherent history, addressing both criminal and civil justice. This book fills this void. Xiaoqun Xu addresses the evolution and function of law codes and judicial practices throughout China's long history, and examines the transition from traditional laws and practices to modern ones in the twentieth century. To the Chinese of the imperial era, justice was an alignment of heavenly reason (tianli), state law (guofa), and human relations (renqing). Such a conception did not change until the turn of the twentieth century, when Western-derived notions-natural rights, legal equality, the rule of law, judicial independence, and due process--came to replace the Confucian moral code of right and wrong. The legal-judicial reform agendas that emerged in the beginning of the twentieth century (and are still ongoing today) stemmed from this change in Chinese moral and legal thinking, but to materialize the said principles in everyday practices is a very different order of things, and the past century was fraught with legal dramas and tragedies. Heaven Has Eyes lays out how and why that is the case.

Circulating the Code

Circulating the Code
Author: Assistant Professor of History Ting Zhang
Publisher:
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2020-04-09
Genre:
ISBN: 9780295747163

Contrary to longtime assumptions about the insular nature of imperial China?s legal system, Circulating the Code demonstrates that in the Qing dynasty (1644?1911) most legal books were commercially published and available to anyone who could afford to buy them. Publishers not only extended circulation of the dynastic code and other legal texts but also enhanced the judicial authority of case precedents and unofficial legal commentaries by making them more broadly available in convenient formats. As a result, the laws no longer represented privileged knowledge monopolized by the imperial state and elites. Trade in commercial legal imprints contributed to the formation of a new legal culture that included the free flow of accurate information, the rise of nonofficial legal experts, a large law-savvy population, and a high litigation rate. Comparing different official and commercial editions of the Qing Code, popular handbooks for amateur legal practitioners, and manuals for community legal lectures, Ting Zhang demonstrates how the dissemination of legal information transformed Chinese law, judicial authority, and popular legal consciousness.