Research on the Judicial System of Late Qing Dynasty Officials

Author: Li Shuguang
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2000-06-01
Features: First, why does this article's title use "Late Qing" instead of the commonly used "Late Qing Dynasty" in domestic academia? The late Qing historian Zheng Tianding once argued that the distinction between "late period" and "late stage" should be made. He believed that the "late period" refers to the stage when the production relations of the Qing Dynasty had completely collapsed and were transitioning to a new social system, while the "late stage" refers to the period when the system had already begun to collapse but had not yet completely done so, with some aspects still having room for development. Second, the term "officials" in this article refers to civilian officials, while the military official system belongs to another topic. Academia has discussed "official system" for a long time, but the author argues that this focuses on specific institutions. In fact, in the system-institution-person loop, the more significant factors influencing China's traditional society for thousands of years are the system and human factors. Specific institutions can change frequently, but the system and human factors are more difficult to change. In summary, this article studies the official law—human law within the framework of the late Qing autocratic centralized system. Third, it must be emphasized that traditional Chinese society only had "jurisprudence," and the understanding of legal concepts differed greatly from the West. It was not until the late Qing period, when Western legal culture was extensively introduced, that the term "jurisprudence" and its methods were used. Therefore, studying the "law" of ancient officials is analyzing traditional institutions from a modern perspective. Technically, the similarities between traditional and modern "official law" are inherent, but their values differ greatly. This article pays particular attention to explaining the impact of this "law" on the historical process of modern China, from the perspective that there is a distance between tradition and modernity, and the meaning of modernity and modernization is also different. The late Qing period mentioned in this article generally begins in the Jiaqing era and ends with the Xinhai Revolution, covering about a decade from the early 19th to the early 20th century, with a span of over a hundred years. This period was a social transformation from the "unprecedented prosperity" of the Qing Dynasty to the "world's end," marking a period of great change. It demonstrated the arduous path the Chinese nation took to move from a feudal society to modernity.