LEGALIZING SPACE IN CHINA: THE STRUCTURATION OF THE CHINESE IMPERIAL TERRITORY THROUGH A LAYERED LEGAL SYSTEM – REC-STCI

China has been a World-empire for two millenniums, and this imperial dimension remains a key for understanding modern China, as well as the surrounding East-Asian countries: Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Taiwan. East-Asia can be accurately defined as the extension area of Chinese law. East-Asian countries still share a common conception of law, which constitutes the originality of this region and explains much of its evolution.
The Chinese territory is in itself a skilled legal construct. For centuries, its administrative structure combined fundamental laws of general application, with regulations particular to provinces, or local areas of variable sizes. Under the Qing, the Chinese 18 provinces were but a part of a broader ensemble, including the Manchurian, Mongolian, Turkistan, and Tibetan areas. Each of them was governed according to its own rules, under the supervision of a bureaucratic service whose main function was to ensure connection with the general legal system.
Our project is to understand space as a major dimension of the Chinese and Pan-Chinese legal order. How did this original conception of law articulate the global— “all under heaven”— and the local, the narrowly Han-Chinese with the broader margins ethnic extensions? How did legal and administrative divisions of the Chinese and East-Asian space give birth to local or national identities?
Project members share a common interest in, and have a good knowledge of, Chinese law, though each of them acquired it through focus on particular areas, such as Mongol law, urban administration, local customs and clan rules in rural areas, customs of “ethnic minorities” including Tibetan populations in the Chinese Sichuan province, Korean and Japanese colonial legislation, etc.
We intend to put online the main texts of the Chinese legal tradition, starting with various editions of the Ming and Qing imperial codes. We plan to organize links that will allow us to understand how this dynastic code interrelated with normative texts ruling particular areas, and to translate a selection of these legal texts, administrative practices, legal decisions that ensured law and order at the various levels of the Chinese imperial space.
China not only produced models for codes and regulations in other East Asian countries but also produced the skilled jurisprudence that allowed their application. Until the last two decades, the Western specialist of China have commonly neglected or even despised the Chinese legal tradition. The common prejudice, spread by lawyers-historians like Jean Escarra, was that China had “laws but no law and jurisprudence” (“des lois mais pas de droit”). This kind of view fomented the belief that Chinese law and its East-Asian siblings could be approached only through Western modes of reasoning, which serves as a main source of misunderstanding and prejudice concerning East Asian law.
Time has come to investigate the Chinese legal tradition to its roots. Chinese law has exhibited, in administrative skills as well as learned jurisprudence, the ability to keep legal cohesion while allowing considerable discrepancies at the local level.
This project aims at highlighting the role of law in the building and maintaining of the Chinese empire. It aims to understand how different rules could be conciliated in a unified legal system, by focusing on the Qing period (1644-1911) and using the Qing code (Da Qing lüli) as a leading thread. We intend 1) to survey and collect a great variety of laws and regulation which ensured at various levels the application of the imperial code; 2) to show how these rules were connected with the imperial code; and 3) how these connection were articulated through a skilled jurisprudence, as presented in a specialized literature of handbooks, casebooks, etc.