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Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes: Sovereignty, Justice, and Transcultural Politics

Li Chen, University of Toronto

Columbia University Press, 2016

Publisher’s Description:
How were Chinese law and society imagined by American schoolchildren, French philosophers, Russian Sinologists, German missionaries, Dutch merchants, and British lawyers? What happened when agents of presumably dominant Western empires had to endure the humiliations and anxieties in maintaining the profitable but precarious relationship with China for more than two centuries? In Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes, Li Chen provides an interdisciplinary analysis of these related issues to explore the intersection of law, culture, and politics in the context of Sino-Western encounters approximately from the 1740s through the 1840s.

Utilizing a wide array of sources, Li Chen investigates the archival, popular, intellectual, and official aspects of Sino-Western relations during the formative century prior to 1843. He highlights the centrality of law to a number of significant events in Sino-Western encounters, and offers new perspectives on the origins of comparative Chinese law in the West, the First Opium War in 1839-42, and foreign extraterritoriality in China. This book also traces the dynamic forces and processes by which some of the most influential ideas of Sino-Western cultural and racial boundaries were created, contested, and normalized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Critical reexamination of Sino-Western legal disputes, cultural borrowings, and negotiation over imperial interests and sovereignty during this period suggests that the history of early modern Sino-Western encounters was much more complicated and multifaceted than either the popular theory of the inevitable clash of civilizations or the earlier conception of Orientalism as a coherent and totalizing discourse of Western hegemony has led us to assume. The shifting balance of economic-political power profoundly shaped the formation and transformation of knowledge of Chinese law and society in different contact zones in places like China, India, and Euroamerican metropolises. Recovering the transformative, variegated, and sometimes contradictory roles of Chinese law in European “modernization” in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries also helps “provincialize” the subsequent Euroamericentric narratives of global modernity. In this empirically grounded, multidimensional study, Chen draws attention to the many under-analyzed moments and sites at which imperial ideology, national sovereignty, cultural tradition, or international order were structured or redefined. It speaks to ongoing debates on the history of sentimental imperialism, liberalism, humanism, international law, and identity politics.

More information about how to purchase the book is available at Columbia University Press, and the book is also available at Amazon

Li Chen is currently Associate Professor of history at the University of Toronto, founding president of the International Society for Chinese law and History, and member of the editorial board of Law and History Review. Besides a number of publications, he is also a co-editor (with Madeleine Zelin) of Chinese Law: Knowledge, Practice and Transformation, 1530s-1950s (Brill, 2015), available here.

More information about the author and his research interests and publications is available here

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Imperial Archives and Historiography of Western Extraterritoriality in China
2. Translation of the Qing Code and Colonial Origins of Comparative Chinese Law
3. Chinese Law in the Formation of European Modernity
4. Sentimental Imperialism and the Global Spectacle of Chinese Punishments
5. Law and Empire in the Making of the First Opium War
Conclusion
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index

Keywords
Chinese law, legal history, legal orientalism, law and empire, comparative legal studies, colonialism, extraterritoriality, Sir George Thomas Staunton, translation, Qing Code, Chinese penal code, transcultural politics, contact zone, imperialism, legality of empire, legal formation of empire, imperial formation of law, origins of extraterritoriality, extraterritoriality in China, unequal treaties, the Opium War, Sino-Western relations, sentimentalism, sentimental imperialism, sympathy, punishment, spectacle of cruelty, moral geography, the MaCartney embassy, Sino-British relations, translation of the Qing Code, Ta Tsing Leu Lee, the Great Qing Code, Sir William Jones, Sir Mackintosh, Sir Thomas Babington Macaulay, Lin Zexu, Commissioner Lin, John King Fairbank, the Lady Hughes case of 1784, the Neptune Case of 1807, the Emily Case of 1821, the Canton System, the Opium Debate, British debate on legal codification, the Indian Penal Code, the Indian legal reform, codification, codiphobia, legal modernity, legal reform, colonial archives, primary source and primary discourse, pain of others, injury discourse, discourse of injury, international law, law of nations, Henry Wheaton, Hugo Grotius, Franciscus de Victoria, politics of international law, legal imperialism, Staunton and translation, intercultural encounters, translingual practice, French translation of Chinese law, Punishments of China, visual images of Chinese punishments, “Chinese cruelty,” Orientalism, Edward Said, Qing law, Chinese legal tradition, Chinese legal modernity

Please see below for information on a new article from member Xiaoqun Xu.

“Law, Custom, and Social Norms: Civil Adjudications in Qing and Republican China,” Law and History Review, volume 36, issue 1, February 2018, pp. 77-104

Abstract: This study examines how law, custom, and social norms interacted in civil justice in Qing and Republican China by looking into 152 civil cases tried in 1912, right after the founding of the Republic of China, and a body of legal interpretations from the Supreme Court during 1912-1929, and certain provisions in the Civil Code of 1929-30–the very first one in Chinese history. It shows that both law and custom were invoked by judges within their moral universe or social norms. It traces how the Supreme Court allowed local customs to be a legal ground for rulings in certain civil disputes, and which customs in civil matters in the Qing and the early Republic were, and which were not, “hardened” into the Civil Code. The interplay between law and custom, mediated by judges with their normative sense of right and wrong, constituted both continuity and change in civil justice between the Qing era and the Republican period. Ultimately, the issues addressed here speak to a larger question of how Chinese jurists, within their judicial discretions, tried to strike a difficult but necessary balance between “law-on-books” and “law-in-action,” while law on the books was undergoing important revisions.

Link: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0738248017000554