Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes: Sovereignty, Justice, and Transcultural Politics

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

by Li Chen

How did American schoolchildren, French philosophers, Russian Sinologists, Dutch merchants, and British lawyers imagine China and Chinese law? What happened when agents of presumably dominant Western empires had to endure the humiliations and anxieties of maintaining a profitable but precarious relationship with China? In Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes, Li Chen provides a richly textured analysis of these related issues and their intersection with law, culture, and politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Using a wide array of sources, Chen's study focuses on the power dynamics of Sino-Western relations during the formative century before the First Opium War (1839-1842). He highlights the centrality of law to modern imperial ideology and politics and brings new insight to the origins of comparative Chinese law in the West, the First Opium War, and foreign extraterritoriality in China. The shifting balance of economic and political power formed and transformed knowledge of China and Chinese law in different contact zones. Chen argues that recovering the variegated and contradictory roles of Chinese law in Western "modernization" helps provincialize the subsequent Euro-Americentric discourse of global modernity.

Chen draws attention to important yet underanalyzed sites in which imperial sovereignty, national identity, cultural tradition, or international law and order were defined and restructured. His valuable case studies show how constructed differences between societies were hardened into cultural or racial boundaries and then politicized to rationalize international conflicts and hierarchy.

Genres: China, History

416 pages, Hardcover

First published January 12, 2016

About the author

Li Chen is an Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Her research interests lie in syntax, formal semantics and psycholinguistics.

Reviews

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Li Chen takes a very interesting Foucaultian methodological approach to understanding what led up to and caused the first Opium War. I am not too familiar with this subfield of Chinese history, and it was refreshing to see a recent work that deals with it in an interesting way. Using English, Chinese, and Portuguese-language primary sources, Li Chen introduces new theoretical approaches to the question and the understudied time period between the 1740s and the 1840s in Sino-British relations. The chapter on Staunton's translation of the Qing code is by far the best in my opinion, and the chapter on imperial sentimentality is a very revealing exercise. Working along the tradition of James Hevia, he presents the Opium War not as a clash between cultures and certainly not inevitable, but instead sees it as the meeting and conflict between two empires with their own universalizing ideologies.