Читать книгу Circulating the Code - Ting Zhang - Страница 6

In the summer of 1695, a farmer named Du Huailiang in Liaocheng County, Shandong, turned himself in to the county magistrate. He reported that he had just caught his wife and her lover having sex in his house and that he had known for a long time something “fishy” was going on with his wife and this other man, Chen Wenxian. He testified that on the night in question, when he was sleeping in the courtyard to guard his cattle, he heard noises coming from his bedroom. He quickly got up, picked up a hatchet, and rushed into the room, where he found his wife in bed and Chen, stark naked, trying to get away. Naturally, he was outraged, he explained to the magistrate, so he blocked the door and hacked his wife and Chen to death.

The magistrate launched an investigation and went to Du’s house to collect evidence. He personally examined the two corpses and questioned the neighbors. As a result of his extensive investigation, he discovered that Du had made up the whole story—and the truth was even more sordid. Du had been having an affair with Chen’s wife—not the other way around—for three years. Deeply in love, Du wanted to live with Chen’s wife, and after she ended their illicit relationship, Du desperately wanted to get her husband and his own wife out of the way so that he could reconcile with Mrs. Chen and live openly with her. He knew about a legal loophole that excused homicide by a husband if he caught his wife and her lover in flagrante delicto. According to the Qing Code, “If a wife or concubine commits adultery with another man and her own husband catches the adulterers at the place in the very act of adultery and immediately kills both of them, there is no punishment.”¹ Du was a farmer and had probably received little formal education. But obviously he knew something about the law. He lured Chen to his house for a visit and got him drunk. He then killed his guest with a hatchet and hacked his own wife to death. He took off their clothes to make it look like they had been having sex when he killed them. Du later confessed: “I hoped that if it seemed as though I had killed them while they were committing adultery, I wouldn’t be charged with a crime.”² Du’s hope was in vain because Mrs. Chen’s confession implicated him, and the magistrate was smart enough to see through his scheme. The magistrate sentenced him to be beheaded according to a provision in The Great Qing Code on the crime of premeditated murder.

Qing legal records contain a surprisingly large number of cases like this one—cases that suggest that ordinary people, as well as officials judging them, were quite familiar with the law. These cases raise several major questions about legal knowledge and Qing society: How were Qing officials—such as the magistrate in Du’s murder case—informed about the laws? How did commoners—such as the murderer Du—know about the law? In what forms—and in what venues—did legal information circulate? How did legal knowledge influence people’s actions and decisions? Did the Qing state try to control the dissemination of legal information? What were the cultural, political, and judicial implications of the circulation of legal knowledge?

Scholars have usually assumed that most Qing subjects knew little about the law, as there was no easily recognizable system of legal education. Scholars have also assumed that the Qing state monopolized the production and circulation of accurate legal information and kept the common people in the dark, with little access to precise and up-to-date legal knowledge. These assumptions date back to the Orientalist roots of social science. For example, Max Weber argued that Qing officials received no professional legal training and knew nothing about the law. The Qing legal system was a total disaster because it was run by “amateur officials” with little legal knowledge, in contrast to western Europe’s efficient legal system run by “professionals.”³ Similarly, Wejen Chang’s “Legal Education in Ch’ing China,” the most comprehensive English-language study to date of Qing legal knowledge, argues that the Qing state disappointingly lacked formal legal education for both officials and the common people.⁴ As a result, he concludes, Qing officials had no workable legal knowledge, and the common people could get only fragmented and imprecise ideas about law through sources such as lowbrow novels, plays, and operas.

This narrative about nonexistent legal education and legal knowledge accords with the once dominant assumption that the traditional legal system of China had failed. Qing laws and legal institutions had lacked “separation of power, due process, respect for individual rights, and civil law,” in sharp contrast to the “dynamic and progressive” law and legal system of modern Western Europe. Qing law was viewed as “a tool of autocratic control,” and most of the populace found the law and the legal system too intimidating to turn to when they had problems.⁵ In recent years, however, based on newly opened local legal archives, scholars have challenged this narrative about the traditional Chinese legal system, especially on the level of judicial practice. They have found that Qing society was more litigious than previously thought, so it was not unusual for people to turn to the court to resolve their disputes. The cost of litigation was not as intimidating as scholars previously thought, and local magistrates often sentenced cases according to the statutes and substatutes of The Great Qing Code.⁶ Many of these “new Qing legal history” studies imply that both officials and the common people were more or less familiar with law and legal procedure. But none of these studies has explained how officials and commoners got access to legal knowledge. Even as law has gained presence, the narrative of deficient legal education and legal knowledge has not been seriously challenged.

During the Qing, most reliable legal information circulated in book form, but historians of print culture usually focus on the Song and late Ming periods, when there were important technological breakthroughs and when many elegant editions were produced. The publishing history of the Qing period has long been ignored because of the perception of stricter government censorship, the diminished quality of books and illustrations, and the decline of lavish publishing centers in the Jiangnan area.⁷ However, as historian Cynthia Brokaw argues in her pathbreaking work on Qing printing history, these declines accompanied a sharp rise in the quantity of printed books, a much broader reading audience, lower prices of books, and an expanding publishing industry in other areas of the Qing empire.⁸ Brokaw’s important work is however, focused on Sibao, a rural printing center in Fujian, which published few legal books. In recent years, some historians begin to examine several genres of legal imprints, such as official handbooks (guanzhenshu) and litigation masters’ secret handbooks (songshi miben), but none has systematically analyzed the impact of commercial printing revolution on legal culture.⁹

This book explores the production, circulation, and reception of legal knowledge in Qing China. It focuses on the flow of legal information through both textual and oral channels and the role of legal information in the formation of early modern Chinese legal culture. Drawing on methodologies used in recent scholarship in the fields of print culture and legal history, it demonstrates that the late Ming commercial publishing revolution (ca. 1550s), which continued in the Qing, had a huge impact on the way legal information traveled. Before the late Ming, most books related to the state’s laws were published by official publishing agencies, and accurate legal information was by and large confined within the government. Beginning in the late Ming, however, more and more commercial publishing houses engaged in compiling, printing, and selling legal books, including the Code—the most authoritative legal text in the judicial system. As a matter of fact, the Qing period witnessed a publishing boom in books related to the law.

Analysis of the archives of the Wuyingdian Imperial Publishing House and other official publishers shows that the Qing state did not provide enough usable editions of The Great Qing Code (Da Qing lü jijie fuli or Da Qing lüli) to its judicial officials. The imperial editions of the Code were expensive, updated slowly, printed in a limited number, and issued only to high-ranking officials. Among 131 editions of the Code that I have found, only eleven were published by official publishing houses. Official editions could not meet the demand of officials and commoners who wanted—and needed—to get precise legal knowledge from the Code. In this context, commercial editions flourished and filled the gap. Most Qing legal books were commercially printed and sold freely on the book market, available to anyone who could afford them.

Commercial publishers and non-official editors played a leading role in supplying judicial officials with access to printed, up-to-date editions of the Qing Code. Careful comparison of imperial editions and commercial editions shows that, surprisingly, commercial editions of the Code were not simply reprinted copies of the imperial editions. Commercial publishers and editors reorganized the text of the Code and included additional legal information that was not authorized or approved by the imperial government, such as private legal commentaries, administrative regulations, and case precedents. By the 1800s, based on popular editions published in Hangzhou, commercial publishers had established their own standard format for compiling and publishing the Code, a format quite different from that of imperially authorized editions. These commercially printed Hangzhou editions quickly dominated the book market and became the most widely used and authoritative texts in the Qing judicial system and society. All commercial editions of the Code published after the year 1800 discarded the design of imperial editions and closely followed the content and printing format of these Hangzhou editions.

The commercialization of legal knowledge enhanced the judicial authority of private legal commentaries and case precedents, which were printed along with the imperially promulgated statutes in commercial editions of the Code. Qing officials frequently referred to private commentaries and case precedents when making judicial decisions. County magistrates, such as in murderer Du’s case, who received little formal legal training and were not given imperially authorized copies of the Code could easily buy commercial copies and locate specific provisions when sentencing a case, thanks to the reader-friendly arrangement of texts in commercial legal imprints. Easy access to the laws encouraged officials to make judicial sentences based on the Code more frequently.

Quite different from the old image that the state paid little attention to its officials’ legal education, this research shows that the Qing government established specific and effective regulations regarding officials’ legal training. The Qing rulers especially emphasized such education for newly appointed county magistrates. Although the state did not itself provide formal legal education to officials, it encouraged new officials to buy and read legal books, including the Code, various administrative regulations, official handbooks, and legal treatises, after they passed the civil service examinations and waited for appointment to official posts. The state also established legal examinations for new officials and required new magistrates to pass these examinations before being actually appointed. Officials also placed great emphasis on reading legal books and acquiring useful legal knowledge, noting that it was important and necessary for officials to equip themselves with legal knowledge in order to survive as judges and administrators in this legally sophisticated society.

The commercial printing revolution also made the law more accessible to those outside the official bureaucracy. A new genre of legal imprints called “litigation masters’ secret handbooks” became popular among non-elite readers. These popular legal handbooks demystified and translated complex laws and legal terms into easy-to-understand formats such as rhymed songs and questions and answers. These books compiled legal information useful for commoners and taught it together with litigation skills. Law and punishments in popular handbooks presented law as a tool, a weapon that anyone could use and even abuse to achieve his or her own ends. In other words, popular legal handbooks popularized and vulgarized the laws, empowering readers and encouraging them to use (and abuse) law and the judicial system to solve their problems. The history of popular legal handbooks in late imperial China provides us another salient example on how the book market and commercial publishers challenged state control.

The Qing state and its officials made serious efforts to provide the common people with accurate legal knowledge from the Code through the community moral and legal lecture system. Such knowledge, including many statutes and substatutes regarding important civil and penal laws that commoners would encounter in their lives, was taught orally, with the goal of warning people not to commit crimes and thus promoting public order and morality. The Qing state not only promoted such lectures in China proper but also held similar lectures in frontier regions where the majority of populace were non-Han ethnic groups. Through disseminating orthodox legal information, the Qing state intended to establish judicial authority, stabilize control, and transform (or “acculturate”) local customs in frontier regions. Qing people had unprecedented access to written laws and punishments in the form of texts, speeches, and lectures, thanks to commercially printed editions of the Code, popular legal imprints, and the community lectures.

The popular dissemination of legal knowledge, however, was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, information about the law, particularly punishments, could frighten people into behaving properly. Officials viewed the law as an essential means of moral indoctrination and crime prevention, but legal knowledge was also powerful and potentially “dangerous.” When people knew the laws well, they were more likely to use them to pursue their own ends. Some Qing ruling elites worried that people might be too familiar with the laws and become litigious, which would disturb social stability and add to the workload of the already overburdened judicial system. In other words, there was tension between the state’s interest in disseminating information and its fear that legal knowledge would lead people to manipulate and abuse the law. This tension was rooted in ambiguity and ambivalence about the law in the Confucian classics. While The Rites of Zhou (Zhouli), for example, articulated that a benevolent government should publicize its laws and punishments and let everyone in the realm know them, other classical texts indicated Confucian distaste and distrust for the law, legal knowledge, and litigation.¹⁰ Such tension and ambiguity influenced Qing officials’ attitudes toward and the state’s policy on the publication of law books and community legal cultures, and also affected (and more often undermined) the state’s capability and willingness to control the dissemination of legal knowledge.

This study challenges the previous assumptions that the state monopolized accurate legal knowledge, and that neither officials nor the common people knew much about the laws. It demonstrates that the commercial printing revolution in early modern China fundamentally transformed the judicial system and legal culture. Thanks to commercial legal imprints and community lectures, legal knowledge was widely available in the Qing, and both officials and commoners had ready access to it. The book market, rather than the Qing state, led the production and dissemination of accurate legal information. The Qing judicial system depended on the market for timely information. By publishing and circulating legal books, especially The Great Qing Code, commercial publishers and editors redefined the legal system and introduced new sources of judicial authority. Commercial legal publications also transformed popular views of the law and fostered popular legal awareness in Qing local society. The flourishing trade in commercial legal imprints contributed to the formation of a new legal culture in early modern China; features of this culture included the free flow of accurate legal information, the rise of non-official legal experts, a legally savvy population, and a high litigation rate in local society.

Three important genres of legal imprints are central to this study:

Published legal books: I have documented and studied 131 different editions of The Great Qing Code from several major libraries around the world.¹¹ Many of these editions were previously unknown or unexamined. I have also examined more than sixty-five editions of litigation masters’ secret handbooks, fifteen manuals for community legal lectures, and many official handbooks. These legal books provide valuable information on their compilers, editors, revisers, publishers, printers, and target readers from titles, prefaces, general editorial regulations, and paper and printing quality. The printing format, structure, and content of these books also provide clues about how legal information was transformed during the process of communication and dissemination.

Sources regarding the legal publishing industry: These consist of documents about official and commercial legal publishers, such as the archives of the Wuyingdian Imperial Publishing House in Beijing, documents about some provincial publishing houses in the late Qing, and memoirs of bibliophiles. These documents have plentiful information regarding the daily operation, printing process, costs, profits, book prices, and circulation channels of official and commercial publishers in the Qing.

Documents related to government policies on law and legal knowledge: Examples include imperial edicts, official memorials, and administrative regulations. These sources reveal the state’s changing regulations on and officials’ complicated attitudes toward the dissemination of legal information in the bureaucracy and society. Legal case reports from the archives of the central government and some county-level archives illustrate how the dissemination of legal information impacted people’s legal decisions and judicial practice.