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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.
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. Civil justice is shown to be fundamental to an understanding of social relations and of the way the state sought to regulate those relations through law. 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.
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.
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.
In this book, Max WL Wong provides a new perspective on legal pluralism under the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) and provides an argument that in traditional Chinese legal culture the pluralistic normative orders were blended, in parallel with the established state legal system, to become a complexed administrative system exerting political and social control in Qing China. Specifically, he addresses these key questions. First, how were Chinese laws, and the quasi-legal norms that created a system of legal pluralism in Qing, reformed by the drive for legal modernization in the late Qing and Republican China as a response to the challenge of western laws? And second, how was the pluralistic structure of Chinese laws and norms in Qing China diffused and transplanted to Taiwan, Hong Kong and South East Asia in the form of ‘Chinese customary law’? Also, how was Chinese law subdued by the imposed legal systems of the colonisers, mainly Great Britain and Japan?
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.
At the outset of the Nanjing decade (1928-1937), a small group of Chinese legal elites worked to codify the terms that would bring the institutions of marriage and family into the modern world. Their deliberations produced the Republican Civil Code of 1929-1930, the first Chinese law code endowed with the principle of individual rights and gender equality. In the decades that followed, hundreds of thousands of women and men adopted the new marriage laws and brought myriad domestic grievances before the courts. Intolerable Cruelty thoughtfully explores key issues in modern Chinese history, including state-society relations, social transformation, and gender relations in the context of the Republican Chinese experiment with liberal modernity. Investigating both the codification process and the subsequent implementation of the Code, Margaret Kuo deftly challenges arguments that discount Republican law as an elite pursuit that failed to exert much influence beyond modernized urban households. She reconsiders the dominant narratives of the 1930s and 1940s as "dark years" for Chinese women. Instead, she convincingly recasts the history of these years from the perspective of women who actively and successfully engaged the law to improve their lives.
This book is the first attempt in the English language to study and evaluate the new Chinese Civil Code.
The culmination of twenty years of research, this essential book completes distinguished historian Philip C. C. Huang's pathbreaking trilogy on Chinese law and society from late imperial times to the present. The author argues that, despite formal adherence to Western law and legal theory, traditional Chinese judicial practices continue to flourish. Huang draws on a rich array of court records and field interviews to illustrate the surprising strength of traditional Chinese civil justice, as can be seen in societal and cadres mediation, and in court actions with respect to property rights, inheritance and old-age maintenance, and debts. Maoist justice too remains influential, especially its divorce and court mediation practices. Finally, despite the recent massive adoption of Western laws, legal reasoning employed in judicial practice has shown stunning continuity, with major implications for China's future.