| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Philip C. C. Huang. Code, Custom, and Legal Practice in China: The Qing and the Republic Compared. (Law, Society, and Culture in China.) Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2001. Pp. ix, 246. Cloth $49.50, paper $19.95.

Philip C. C. Huang's Civil Justice in China: Representation and Practice in the Qing (1996) was a major contribution to scholarly understanding of late imperial Chinese history and society. Using 628 newly available cases spanning the years 1760–1909 from three rural county archives, a careful reading of the Qing Code itself, local magistrate handbooks, and the South Manchurian Railway Company's surveys of local customs, Huang quite handily overturned much of the conventional appreciation of the role of law and its employment by the village population in Qing China. The Qing Code, of course, was in form exclusively a criminal code, its statutes throughout stated as prohibitions and restrictions, the violation of which was subject to a range of punishments by a "legalist" state. In practice, however, large sections of the code and its substatutes dealt with matters that we would properly characterize as "civil law" (e.g. conditional transfers of land, debt, inheritance and old age support, and aspects of marriage and divorce). And the populace made extensive use (perhaps a third of the total case load) of the local magistrates courts to bring suits or threaten to sue on a whole range of civil disputes, characterized as "minor matters" in the Qing Code. Moreover, in practice, magistrates frequently tempered the application of the code by taking prevalent local custom into account in their decisions, and complaints that were filed were often settled among the parties themselves, before they received a formal court hearing but under the influence of probable action by the court. . . .

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