Legal Origins: East and West

Author: Xia Yong
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-11-01
Features: Systematically discusses the historical origins and evolution of the rule of law, the traditional legal system of China and its reforms, and the characteristics of the rule of law in China and other countries. The first chapter "What is the Rule of Law," primarily organizes and analyzes Western classical theories of the rule of law, ultimately landing on the ideological logic of the formation of contemporary Chinese concepts of the rule of law. The second chapter "Revisiting the Rule of Law Thought in Ancient China," the third chapter "Legal Reform Thought and the Rule of Law in China at the End of the Qing Dynasty and the Early Republic," and the fourth chapter "China's Traditional Legal System and Its Reforms" primarily organize and analyze the historical concepts of the rule of law in China and their relationship with mainstream thought, proposing some issues worth re-examining and researching. This part of the research spanned several years and was mainly stored as lecture notes. The fifth chapter "Confucius and Plato," the sixth chapter "The Code of Hammurabi and the Rule of Law in Ancient East," and the seventh chapter "The Quran as Law" were initially completed in the late 1980s of the last century and were also mainly used as lecture notes. These three chapters can broaden and enrich readers' historical perspective and interest, and also help increase the understanding and grasp of the legal culture of Eastern countries, which differs from the Western legal tradition. The eighth chapter "Postmodernism and the Rule of Law in Non-Western Countries" has the flavor of a nationalist declaration, focusing on the expression of my recent thoughts on the issues of the "modernization" and "Westernization" of the legal system. The compressed version of the first chapter and the full text of the eighth chapter were successively published in the Social Sciences in China and the Reading magazine, while the other chapters have not been officially published.