Synopses & Reviews
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 1760s to the 1900s, 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.
Synopsis
The opening of archives on legal case records and judicial administration in China has made possible a new examination of past assumptions about the Chinese justice system. Scholars can now ask where actual legal practice deviated from official and popular conceptualizations and depictions. In the process, they can arrive at a new understanding not only of the legal system, but of state-society relations and the nature of the Chinese social-political system as a whole. Studies of Chinese justice also permit the joining together of social and cultural history. Historians of society and economy, on the one hand, and of mentalities and culture, on the other, have long tended to go their separate ways. Law, however, is a sphere of life in which the two are inseparable. Legal case records contain evidence for both practice and representation. A study of law can tell us about the interconnections between actions and attitudes in ways that segmented studies of each cannot.
Synopsis
Based on newly available records of 628 civil dispute cases from the 1760's to the 1900's, this book challenges many conventional assumptions about the Qing legal system.
Synopsis
“This is a book that we have long been waiting for, because it tackles a previously neglected aspect of Chinese law, the civil law.”—American Historical Review
Synopsis
This book provides a re-assessment of the workings of the Chinese legal system during the Qing period. It questions conventional assumptions that Qing courts rarely handled civil lawsuits, that respectable people did not use the courts, and that magistrates relied more on moral predilections than on codified law in dealing with cases. Based on the records of 628 civil dispute cases from three counties from the 1760s to the 1900s, this study shows that disputes over land, debt, marriage, and inheritance actually made up a major part of the caseloads of local courts. The case records reveal that when community/kin mediation failed, many common peasants resorted to the courts to protect their legitimate claims. By examining the social setting in which such disputes arose and the ways in which they were resolved, we can learn a great deal about the workings of Chinese society.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [247]-254) and index.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction; 2. Defining categories: disputes and lawsuits in North China villages before the communist revolution; 3. Informal justice: mediation in North China villages before the communist revolution; 4. Formal justice: codified law and magisterial adjudication in the Qing; 5. Between informal mediation and formal adjudication: the third realm of Qing justice; 6. Two patterns in the Qing civil justice system; 7. Extent, cost and strategies of litigation; 8. From the perspective of magistrate handbooks; 9. Max Weber and the Qing legal and political system; Appendixes; References; Index.