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Author: Brian E. McKnight
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1992-10-30
Total Pages: 575
ISBN-13: 0521411211
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis work is the first comprehensive study of law enforcement in traditional China. The depth and rigour to which the subject is treated makes it invaluable in the study of Chinese society or law and order.
Author: Bettine Birge
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2002-01-07
Total Pages: 369
ISBN-13: 1139431072
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book, originally published in 2002, argues that the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century precipitated a transformation of marriage and property law in China that deprived women of their property rights and reduced their legal and economic autonomy. It describes how after a period during which women's property rights were steadily improving, and laws and practices affecting marriage and property were moving away from Confucian ideals, the Mongol occupation created a new constellation of property and gender relations that persisted to the end of the imperial era. It shows how the Mongol-Yüan rule in China ironically created the conditions for radical changes in the law, which for the first time brought it into line with the goals of Learning the Way Confucians and which curtailed women's financial and personal autonomy. The book evaluates the Mongol invasion and its influence on Chinese law and society.
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Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 1999-09-02
Total Pages: 592
ISBN-13: 9780791442432
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe first English translation of a selection of legal documents from Sung Dynasty China, this work provides a fascinating look at the legal, social, and economic history of that era.
Author: Karil J. Kucera
Publisher: Cambria Press
Published: 2016-01-28
Total Pages: 414
ISBN-13: 1621967131
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIncludes 159 color images. Baodingshan consists of a monastic complex and two rock-carved areas, Little Buddha Bend and Great Buddha Bend, located in Dazu in western China and dates from the Southern Song period. The complex is fundamentally different from earlier Buddhist rock-carved sites in China in its construction and layout. Foregoing traditional niche-based iconography for large, deeply cut reliefs reaching dimensions as great as eight meters high by twenty meters wide, within Baodingshan's Great Buddha Bend, the carved works flow from one tableau into another. The site contains both texts and images related to the main schools of Buddhist thought. This book presents an integrated analysis of all of the components of Great Buddha Bend within the greater Baodingshan site, something that was lacking in earlier studies. Written to provide guidance to the site for a wide spectrum of readers-specialists and non-specialists alike-it provides a clear explanation of the major iconographic features of the imagery as well as translations of the numerous accompanying carved Buddhist texts. It also presents the basic tenets of Pure Land, Chan [Zen], Huayan and Esoteric Buddhism in order to explain the features of these sects as seen represented in visual as well as textual form at the site. Lastly, with its focus on ritual use and audience reception from the 12th to the 21st century, this study provides a new model for the discussion and evaluation of other religious sites as entities that organically evolve over time. This study also includes new translations of both the inscribed Buddhist texts and secular inscriptions carved at the site dating from the twelfth through the twenty-first centuries-inscriptions left by educated elite, soldiers, and government officials, highlighting regional issues related to continuity and change made visible at Baodingshan.
Author: Geoffrey MacCormack
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 1996
Total Pages: 292
ISBN-13: 9780820317229
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBy the end of the eighth century A.D., imperial China had established a system of administrative and penal law, the main institutions of which lasted until the collapse of the Ch'ing dynasty in 1911. The Spirit of Traditional Chinese Law studies the views held throughout the centuries by the educated elite on the role of law in government, the relationship between law and morality, and the purpose of punishment. Geoffrey MacCormack's introduction offers a brief history of legal development in China, describes the principal contributions to the law of the Confucian and Legalist schools, and identifies several other attributes that might be said to constitute the "spirit" of the law. Subsequent chapters consider these attributes, which include conservatism, symbolism, the value attached to human life, the technical construction of the codes, the rationality of the legal process, and the purposes of punishment. A study of the "spirit" of the law in imperial China is particularly appropriate, says MacCormack, for a number of laws in the penal codes on family relationships, property ownership, and commercial transactions were probably never meant to be enforced. Rather, such laws were more symbolic and expressed an ideal toward which people should strive. In many cases even the laws that were enforced, such as those directed at the suppression of theft or killing, were also regarded as an emphatic expression of the right way to behave. Throughout his study, MacCormack distinguishes between "official," or penal and administrative, law, which emanated from the emperor to his officials, and "unofficial," or customary, law, which developed in certain localities or among associations of merchants and traders. In addition, MacCormack pays particular attention to the law's emphasis on the hierarchical ordering of relationships between individuals such as ruler and minister, ruler and subject, parent and child, and husband and wife. He also seeks to explain why, over nearly thirteen centuries, there was little change in the main moral and legal prescriptions, despite enormous social and economic changes.
Author: Billy K.L. So
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2020-03-23
Total Pages: 501
ISBN-13: 1684173485
DOWNLOAD EBOOKProsperity signifies success in economic performance. Economic performance always takes place in a spatial context. And institutions matter in economic performance. These three interwoven themes underlie this inquiry into the regional economy of southern Fukien province during the Sung and Yuan dynasties, when the area was one of the most prosperous regions in China. Through a meticulous reading of the sources, the author seeks to understand the meaning of prosperity in the premodern Chinese context and argues that we have to understand economic performance as a process occurring in space and influenced by institutions, which affect economic actors particularly through the means of transaction costs.
Author: Randall Peerenboom
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2002-09-26
Total Pages: 700
ISBN-13: 9780521016742
DOWNLOAD EBOOKChina has enjoyed considerable economic growth in recent years in spite of an immature, albeit rapidly developing, legal system, a system whose nature, evolution and path of development have been poorly understood by scholars. Drawing on his legal and business experience in China as well as his academic background in the field, Peerenboom provides a detailed analysis of China's legal reforms. He argues that China is in transition from rule by law to a version of rule of law, though most likely not a liberal democratic version as found in economically advanced countries in the West. Maintaining that law plays a key role in China's economic growth, Peerenboom assesses reform proposals and makes his own recommendations. In addition to students and scholars of Chinese law, political science, sociology and economics, this will interest business professionals, policy advisors, and governmental and non-governmental agencies as well as comparative legal scholars and philosophers.
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Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2014-12-04
Total Pages: 1713
ISBN-13: 9004271643
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA follow-up to Early Chinese Religion (Brill, 2009-10), Modern Chinese Religion focuses on the third period of paradigm shift in Chinese cultural and religious history, from the Song to the Yuan (960-1368 AD). As in the earlier periods, political division gave urgency to the invention of new models that would then remain dominant for six centuries. Defining religion as “value systems in practice”, this multi-disciplinary work shows the processes of rationalization and interiorization at work in the rituals, self-cultivation practices, thought, and iconography of elite forms of Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism, as well as in medicine. At the same time, lay Buddhism, Daoist exorcism, and medium-based local religion contributed each in its own way to the creation of modern popular religion. With contributions by Juhn Ahn, Bai Bin, Chen Shuguo, Patricia Ebrey, Michael Fuller, Mark Halperin, Susan Huang, Dieter Kuhn, Nap-yin Lau, Fu-shih Lin, Pierre Marsone, Matsumoto Kôichi, Joseph McDermott, Tracy Miller, Julia Murray, Ong Chang Woei, Fabien Simonis, Dan Stevenson, Curie Virag, Michael Walsh, Linda Walton, Yokote Yutaka, Zhang Zong
Author: Yuansheng Liang
Publisher: Chinese University Press
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 270
ISBN-13: 9789629962395
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe contributors to this collection offer seven case studies that treat different aspects of political and ritual legitimation in China and Europe over the past two millennia. With a primary focus on crisis and change, the contributors analyze how rulers and states work to produce a popular political consensus that accepts their rule.
Author: Klaus Mu_hlhahn
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2009-04-30
Total Pages: 378
ISBN-13: 9780674054332
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn a groundbreaking work, Klaus Muhlhahn offers a comprehensive examination of the criminal justice system in modern China, an institution deeply rooted in politics, society, and culture. In late imperial China, flogging, tattooing, torture, and servitude were routine punishments. Sentences, including executions, were generally carried out in public. After 1905, in a drive to build a strong state and curtail pressure from the West, Chinese officials initiated major legal reforms. Physical punishments were replaced by fines and imprisonment. Capital punishment, though removed from the public sphere, remained in force for the worst crimes. Trials no longer relied on confessions obtained through torture but were instead held in open court and based on evidence. Prison reform became the centerpiece of an ambitious social-improvement program. After 1949, the Chinese communists developed their own definitions of criminality and new forms of punishment. People's tribunals were convened before large crowds, which often participated in the proceedings. At the center of the socialist system was reform through labor, and thousands of camps administered prison sentences. Eventually, the communist leadership used the camps to detain anyone who offended against the new society, and the crime of counterrevolution was born. Muhlhahn reveals the broad contours of criminal justice from late imperial China to the Deng reform era and details the underlying values, successes and failures, and ultimate human costs of the system. Based on unprecedented research in Chinese archives and incorporating prisoner testimonies, witness reports, and interviews, this book is essential reading for understanding modern China.
