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. Huang shows how, at the level of ideology and theory,
traditional Chinese law has been rejected time and again in the past
century by China's own lawmakers, first in the late Qing and the
republic, then in the revolutionary and Maoist periods of the People's
Republic, and finally again in the current reform era. Considering legal
theory alone, modern Chinese law can only be Western law, and past
Chinese law-traditional or Maoist-can have no role under the
leadership's current preoccupations with modernization and
marketization. But what has actually happened historically at the level
of judicial practice and the daily lives of common people? In exploring
this central question, Huang draws on a rich array of court records and
field interviews to illustrate the surprising strength of traditional
Chinese civil justice. Albeit much altered, its legacy can be traced in
informal and semiformal community justice (e.g., societal and cadres
mediation), as well as in multiple spheres of court-administered formal
civil justice, including property rights, inheritance and old-age
maintenance, and debt obligations. He also identifies the influence of
Maoist justice, especially its divorce and civil court mediation
practices. Finally, despite the reform era's massive importation of
Western laws, legal reasoning employed in judicial practice has shown
remarkable continuity, with major implications for China's future legal
system.
