Contract and Property in Early Modern China英文版本.pdfVIP

M A D E L E I N E Z E L I N 1 A Critique of Rights of Property in Prewar China The penal emphasis of [Chinese]law, for example, meant that matters of a civil nature were either ignored by it entirely (for example, contracts) or were given only limited treatment within its penal format (for example, property rights, inheri- tance, marriage). . . .What really concerned the law-though this is to be surmised rather than explicitly read in the Chinese legal literature-were all acts of moral or ritual impropriety or of criminal violence which seemed in Chinese eyes to be vio- lations or disruptions of the total social order. . . .When this law appeared, however, it was used neither to uphold tradi- tional religious values nor to protect private property. Rather, its primary purpose was political. Bodde and Morris 1967l The history of Chinas use of contracts is a long one. Its begin- nings were probably in primitive times. Today the oldest sur- viving contract for which we have a text we can verify, for which there is an actual object to investigate, is a bronze in- scription from the Western Zhou. After the Western Han this kind of material is found in every period. Zhang Chuanxi 1995 HOW DO WE reconcile these two snapshots of Chinese legal culture?- one in which the law of the state, and by extension its agents in the field, pays only glancing attention to the economic relationships that exist between individuals; and one in which written agreements be- tween individuals play a major, if not dominant, role in those same transactions.