作者简介
Xiaoqun Xu is Professor of History at Christopher Newport University.
内容简介
Heaven Has Eyes is a comprehensive but conci se history of Chinese law and justice from the imperial era to the post-Mao era. Never before has a single book treated the traditional Chinese law and judicial practices and their modern counterparts as a coherent history, addressing both cri mi nal and civil justice. This book fills this void.
Xiaoqun Xu addresses the evolution and function of law code s and judicial practices throughout China's long history, and e x amines the transition from traditional laws and practices to modern one s in the twentieth century. To the Chinese of the imperial era, justice was an alignment of heavenly reason (tianli), state law (guofa), and human relations (renqing). Such a conception did not change until the turn of the twentieth century, when Western-derived notions-natural rights, legal equality, the rule of law, judicial independence, and due pro cess--came to replace the Confucian moral code of right and wrong. The legal-judicial reform agendas that emerged in the beginning of the twentieth century (and are still on go ing today) stemmed from this change in Chinese moral and legal thinking, but to materialize the said principles in everyday practices is a very different order of things, and the past century was fraught with legal dramas and tragedies. Heaven Has Eyes lays out how and why that is the case.
Xiaoqun Xu is Professor of History at Christopher Newport University.
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