Chinese Justice Research Articles

The British at Weihaiwei: A Case Study in the Irrationality of Empire

The grand spectacle of Britain's return of Hong Kong, its colony since the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, to Chinese sovereignty in July 1997 served to dramatize to a global audience the end of imperialism in its most overt political form. Beginning with China's defeat in the First Opium War in 1842, Britain and other European powers came to exercise varying degrees of forcible dominion, wrapped in a confusing array of legal guises, over parts of this proud but endangered country. Known to the Chinese ever since as the “unequal treaties,” these agreements progressively infringed on China's sovereignty, administrative and legal integrity, and economic viability. Extraterritorial rights exempting foreigners from Chinese justice, treaty ports where administration was in the hands of foreigners, and foreign control of extensive portions of Chinese bureaucratic administration, including even the country's ability to collect revenue through the Maritime Customs Service—all became part of the elaborate edifice of extraordinary rights and privileges that the powers created for themselves in the name of the “great game” of empire in China.1

Chinese justice, the fiction: law and literature in modern China

Chinese justice, the fiction: law and literature in modern China

Jeffrey C. Kinkley, Chinese Justice, the Fiction: Law and Literature in Modern China

Jeffrey C. Kinkley, Chinese Justice, the Fiction: Law and Literature in Modern China

Mirbeau's Ultraviolence

SET IN A MYTHICAL CHINA, Octave Mirbeau's 1899 novel Jardin des supplices is a sustained narrative in which scenes of bloody torture are set against a story of a decadent love affair between the narrator and the female protagonist, Clara. The novel is divided into three sections, of which the first is a frontispiece, consisting in the main of reworked material from Divagations sur le meurtre (1896) and loi du meurtre (1892). The frontispiece is a somewhat sardonic and ironic defense of murder reminiscent of the preand post-coital philosophical treatises in Sade's novels. The second section, En Mission, the first part of the novel per se, is told in flashback and is a disquisition on the petty and tawdry politics of Europe. In the middle of this section, the narrator first meets Clara. They go to the Indies and then head toward the China of hallucinatory scenarios, of fantastic justice, of torture, eroticism, and death. The third and longest part, entitled Le Jardin des Supplices, is a tour of the Chinese torture garden that gives its name to the book; it is a series of tableaux serving as fantasized image of Chinese justice and punishment. The dimensions of the love affair resemble many of those masterfully described by Mario Praz in his classic work, La Carne, la morte e il diavolo. More singular, however, is the discussion of politics. Through its construction, which opposes a satire about European politics and institutions to the depiction of the scenes of torture, Jardin des supplices has often been seen as an indication of the author's disgust with the Western world's hypocritical smugness about democracy and freedom.1 For Mirbeau, modern Western societies parade their violence as virtuous justice, their abuses as economic and moral strengths, their chicanery as a fair political system (Ziegler 162-65). Mirbeau rails against the inhuman, depersonalized world of the West for which Kafka will provide the most poignant literary version in works like The Castle and of which Hannah Arendt will eventually say, Today we ought to add the latest and perhaps most formidable form of such domination [of man over man]: bureaucracy or the rule of an intricate system of bureaus in which no men, neither one nor the best,

Role Expectation as the Principal Criterion in Justice Judgment Among Hong Kong Chinese Students

ABSTRACT On the basis of a review of the dominant social philosophies and the legal system in traditional Chinese societies, I hypothesized that whether role expectations are met may be the dominant criterion of Chinese justice judgment. This contention was tested among Hong Kong Chinese students in two studies. In Study 1, I found that the traditional Chinese moral percept, “yi” (righteousness), and role expectation were the dominant criteria of justice judgment among college students. In Study 2, I found that, among high school students, violation of role expectation was used as a principal criterion in judgment concerning personal desert. The results of these two studies showed that, despite the rapid modernization process that has occurred in Hong Kong in the past decades, normative role expectation remains a dominant criterion of justice judgment among Hong Kong Chinese.

The Quality of Mercy. Amnesties and Traditional Chinese Justice.

The Quality of Mercy. Amnesties and Traditional Chinese Justice.

The Quality of Mercy, Amnesties and Traditional Chinese Justice

The Quality of Mercy, Amnesties and Traditional Chinese Justice

The Quality of Mercy: Amnesties and Traditional Chinese Justice. By Brian E. Mcknight, pp. xiii, 173. Honolulu, University Press of Hawaii, [1981]. $15.

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The Quality of Mercy: Amnesties and Traditional Chinese Justice. By Brian E. McKnight. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1981. xii, 172 pp. Notes, Bibliography, Glossary, Index. $15.

The Quality of Mercy: Amnesties and Traditional Chinese Justice. By Brian E. McKnight. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1981. xii, 172 pp. Notes, Bibliography, Glossary, Index. $15.

Brian E. McKnight. The Quality of Mercy: Amnesties and Traditional Chinese Justice. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii. 1981. Pp. xii, 172. $15.00

Brian E. McKnight. <italic>The Quality of Mercy: Amnesties and Traditional Chinese Justice</italic>. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii. 1981. Pp. xii, 172. $15.00

The Quality of Mercy: Amnesties and Traditional Chinese Justice

The Quality of Mercy: Amnesties and Traditional Chinese Justice