In my previous post, I provided a brief overview of Chinese legal historiography. In this penultimate post, I want to offer a resource on more recent historical scholarship looking at any facet of Chinese law. Below is a list of English-language studies of Chinese legal history published after the 1980s with the opening of legal archives in China. These titles focus on the Qing dynasty (1644-1912); the Republican era (1912-1949); and the People’s Republic of China (1949-present). This list is by no means comprehensive, and titles are inexactly grouped by general categories. Since this list is directed at non-specialists, I have not included Chinese or Japanese scholarship, which have done even more work on the subject. (Please also forgive me if I have overlooked anyone's work!) Nonetheless, I hope this list offers an entry point for anyone who want to read more on this subject or diversify their legal history syllabi to include more studies of Chinese legal history.
For my forthcoming final post, I will spotlight five titles with more detailed descriptions.
Overview of Chinese Legal History
Xiaoqun Xu, Heaven Has Eyes: A History of Chinese Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
Philip C. C. Huang, Civil Justice in China: Representation and Practice in the Qing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).
-----, Code, Custom, and Legal Practice in China: The Qing and the Republic Compared (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
Law, Gender, and Sexuality
Kathyrn Bernhardt, Women and Property in China, 960–1949 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
Margaret Kuo, Intolerable Cruelty Marriage, Law, and Society in Early Twentieth-Century China (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012).
Matthew H. Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
-----, Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China Survival Strategies and Judicial Interventions (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2015).
Janet M. Theiss, Disgraceful Matters: The Politics of Chastity in Eighteenth-Century China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004).
Courts and Trials
Daniel Asen, Death in Beijing: Murder and Forensic Science in Republican China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Quinn Javers, Conflict, Community, and the State in Late Imperial Sichuan: Making Local Justice (Milton: Routledge, 2019).
Bradley W. Reed, Talons and Teeth: County Clerks and Runners in the Qing Dynasty (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
Xiaoqun Xu, Trial of Modernity: Judicial Reform in Early Twentieth-Century China (1901–1937) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).
Law and Legal Culture
Robert E. Hegel and Katherine Carlitz, eds., Writing and the Law in Late Imperial China: Crime, Conflict, and Judgment (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007).
Eugenia Lean, Public Passions: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007).
Melissa Macauley, Social Power and Legal Culture: Litigation Masters in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
Ting Zhang, Circulating the Code: Print Media and Legal Knowledge in Qing China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020).
Law and the Economy
Maura D. Dykstra, “Complicated Matters: Commercial Dispute Resolution in Qing Chongqing from 1750 to 1911” (PhD dissertation: University of California, Los Angeles, 2014).
Philip Thai, China’s War on Smuggling: Law, Economic Life, and the Making of the Modern State, 1842–1965 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
Fei-hsien Wang, Pirates and Publishers: A Social History of Copyright in Modern China (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).
Madeleine Zelin, The Merchants of Zigong: Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early Modern China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
-----, “A Deep History of Chinese Shareholding,” Law and History Review, vol. 37, no. 2 (2019): 325–351.
Madeleine Zelin, Jonathan K. Ocko, and Robert Gardella, eds., Contract and Property in Early Modern China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).
Taisu Zhang, The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Preindustrial China and England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Law and Ethnic Statecraft
Wesley B. Chaney, “Land, Trade, and the Law on the Sino-Tibetan Border, 1723–1911” (PhD dissertation: Stanford University, 2016).
-----, “Threats to Gong: Environmental Change and Social Transformation in Northwest China,” Late Imperial China, vol. 41, no. 2 (2020): 45–92.
Pamela Kyle Crossley, Helen F. Siu, and Donald S. Sutton, eds., Empire at the Margins: Culture, Identity, and Frontier in Early Modern China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006).
Ying Hu, “Justice on the Steppe: Legal Institutions and Practice in Qing Mongolia” (PhD dissertation: Stanford University, 2014).
Eric Schluessel, Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).
Law and Empire
Pär Kristoffer Cassel, Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Li Chen, Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes: Sovereignty, Justice, and Transcultural Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
Jenny Huangfu Day, “The Enigma of a Taiping Fugitive: The Illusion of Justice and the ‘Political Offence Exception’ in Extradition from Hong Kong,” Law and History Review, vol. 39, no. 3 (2021): 415–450.
Law in the Early People’s Republic
Jennifer Altehenger, Legal Lessons: Popularizing Laws in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1989 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Asia Center, 2018).
Xiaoping Cong, Marriage, Law and Gender in Revolutionary China, 1940–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Alexander Cook, The Cultural Revolution on Trial: Mao and the Gang of Four (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Neil Diamant, Revolutionizing the Family: Politics, Love, and Divorce in Urban and Rural China, 1949–1968 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000).
Klaus Mühlhahn, Criminal Justice in China: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
Glenn Tiffert, “Judging Revolution: Beijing and the Birth of the PRC Judicial System (1906–1958)” (PhD dissertation: University of California, Berkeley, 2015).
Thank you once again for reading! I hope everyone will find this resource helpful.
—Philip Thai
E-mail | p.thai@northeastern.edu
Twitter | @philip_thai
