Bureaucracy and Judicial Truth in Qing Dynasty Homicide Cases

Abstract

In the past several decades, historians of late imperial Chinese law have moved well beyond previous generations’ reliance on Western-derived conceptual categories and normative standards as benchmarks for analysis and comparison. With archival sources increasingly available, new scholarship has undermined previous assumptions as to the universality of Western social and legal theory by holding such theory against the light of new empirical findings.1 The result has been a quantum leap in our understanding of the complexity and sophistication of the late imperial Chinese legal system. A number of these contemporary scholars have revisited several basic features of the late imperial Chinese judiciary: that it functioned not as an independent organ of government but as an element of the bureaucratic administrative system; that judicial affairs were but one of the many administrative duties for which a county magistrate was held accountable; and that despite the fact that the county magistrate’s yamen served as the court of first instance in all legal cases, magistrates themselves had no specialized training in law other than that gained by field experience or the advisement of private legal secretaries and widely available administrative handbooks. These features were, of course, recognized as well by foreign observers even in the nineteenth century. Current