Legal Specialization, Juridical Capital, and Technocracy in Late Imperial Chinese Governance

Li Chen, University of Toronto

This paper is based on a book manuscript that I plan to complete before the conference and that I have been working on over the last twenty years. The paper seeks to highlight some of the major arguments of the book-length study that have not received adequate attention in prior scholarship. Late imperial China has often been characterized as a society dominated by Confucian norms and teachings including its dismissive or hostile attitude towards the use of law and legal specialists as well as the formal judicial system to resolve conflicts between individuals. This long-standing assumption about the nature of late imperial China as a Confucian society with little need for legal expertise and experts has led to the almost equally long neglect or downplaying of the important roles of non-official legal specialists and legal knowledge. By exploring hundreds of manuscripts and imprints left by Qing legal advisors and local administrators who hired them as well a large body of Qing judicial and administrative archives, my study will offer reinterpretations on a host of important aspects of the juridical field and legal culture in Qing-dynasty China (1644-1911) by reexamining the thousands of non-legal specialists who were hired by officials/judges to help them handle judicial matters in the local courts across the Qing empire. These trained, nonofficial legal specialists became the de facto adjudicators across the country and among the most important producers and disseminators of legal knowledge who shaped not just judicial administration and legal culture but also the way in which the imperial government was structured and managed in Qing China.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 113. Commemorating Xiaohong Xu: Comparative Historical Methodology and China Studies