| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Jeffrey C. Kinkley. Chinese Justice, the Fiction: Law and Literature in Modern China. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2000. Pp. xi, 497. Cloth $69.50, paper $24.95.

After years of Maoist repression, Chinese law and Chinese literature experienced a rebirth in the 1980s. With the advent of the People's Republic of China's (PRC) first promulgated codes of criminal law, criminal procedure, and civil law and the revival of the legal profession came a renaissance of fiction dealing with crime, law, and lawyers. This literature and its relationship to the real world of criminal justice are the subject of Jeffrey C. Kinkley's book. Through an analysis of crime fiction, Kinkley hopes to "illuminate China's new legal culture . . . and the predicament of all modern Chinese literature" (p. 4). 1

In the process of making his argument, Kinkley takes the reader on an excursion through the history of crime and legal fiction in modern China. The first chapter illustrates the renaissance of Chinese crime fiction in 1978–1980. The technique employed here and throughout the book is to use secondary sources on Chinese law and legal history to provide context for description and analysis of representative works of fiction. In subsequent chapters, Kinkley explores the legal literature of imperial China, the Western-influenced detective stories of the Republican period, and the relationship between crime fiction and politics in the PRC. . . .

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