Code, Custom, and Legal Practice in China: The Qing and the Republic Compared. (Book Reviews).

CODE, CUSTOM, AND LEGAL PRACTICE IN CHINA: The Qing and the Republic Compared. By Philip C.C. Huang. Stanford (California): Stanford University Press. 2001. ix, 246 pp. (Tables.) US$49.50, cloth, ISBN 0-8047-4110-7: US$19.95, paper, ISBN 0-8047-4111-5.

Code, Custom, and Legal Practice in China is the latest addition to the series "Law, Society, and Culture in China." In this volume, Philip Huang pursues continuities and disjunctures in Chinese civil justice in the "transition period" of the first half of the twentieth century. Huang seeks to clarify the explicit and implicit logics of codified law, popular custom, and legal practice during the Qing and Republican periods. He bases his study on an impressive number of sources, ranging from the South Manchuria Railway Company to the Beiyang government's Ministry of Justice, and from widely dispersed locations including Beijing, Jiangsu, Sichuan, Taiwan, Zhejiang and Zhili.

This study is divided into two sections. The first part outlines the Qing civil tradition from 1760 to 1900, and revisions to it in the late Qing and early Republican eras. This is followed by a description of the Republican civil code (promulgated in 1930). The second part compares court cases and ethnographic data from the different periods. Six main topic areas, chosen for their significant levels of litigation, are addressed: conditional sales of land, topsoil ownership, debt, old-age support, women's choices in marriage and illicit sex in Qing law, and women's choices in marriage, divorce and adultery in Republican law.

A key finding of Code, Custom, and Legal Practice in China is a paradoxical continuity that persisted in civil justice from 1900 to 1930. Despite a revolution that swept the Qing rulers from power, the Qing criminal code remained the bedrock of its Republican successor for over two decades. Huang also traces fundamental transformations as Republican reformers sought to shift focus from the patrilineal family as the basic social unit to the individual. Huang demonstrates the mercurial nature of efforts to adapt new laws to socio-economic realities, as a predominantly survival-oriented peasant society faltered towards a capitalist economy organized around contract makers. Popular custom, especially in relation to land ownership, proved a potent force that could not easily be put aside.

A particularly valuable aspect of Huang's study is his intriguing analysis of relationships between women and the law. Contrary to received interpretations, Huang makes a compelling case that women were relatively disenfranchised by Republican reforms. He demonstrates how Qing law attributed to women a "passive agency" which could serve in practice to protect and empower them. Ironically, Republican emphasis on individual autonomy could act to strip women of essential legal protection, although urban women did benefit from increased access to divorce and free-choice marriage.

Huang's skillful integration of social and cultural approaches highlights a point that has long been ignored or denied: Qing civil justice was in many ways more responsive and effective than its "revolutionary" successors. Huang finds that Qing law was on the whole more congruent with popular custom than its Republican successor. This important study reveals complex justice systems struggling to reconcile ideology 'with the realities of everyday life. During the much maligned late Qing and Republican eras, civil justice required considered balance between "accommodation and opposition, continuities and radical changes." Code, Custom, and Legal Practice in China underlines the continued relevance of analyzing that balancing act almost one hundred years after the Qing was swept from power.