Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes: Sovereignty, Justice, and Transcultural Politics by Li Chen (review)

This book, published by Columbia University Press in December 2015, investigates how the dominant images of China or Chinese law were created and how and why they acquired extraordinary and lasting power in the context of Sino-Western encounters from approximately the 1740s through the 1840s. By studying a series of pivotal moments of Sino-Western contact and conflict during this period that culminated in the famous First Opium War, I examine the formation and transformation of Western knowledge and perception of Chinese law and society over time. I argue that the resulting Western discourse of China or Chinese law was not only central to many of the disputes that structured the trajectory of Sino-Western relations but also a key site at which the cultural or national boundaries were constructed or negotiated.Unlike many earlier studies, this book concentrates on the century-long period of Sino-Western, especially Sino-British, encounters before 1840, a formative century that has profoundly shaped modern Sino-Western relations but has received only scant attention among scholars of China since the 1930s. Moreover, instead of studying this period as a diplomatic, intellectual, or literary history, this book provides an integrative, critical analysis of the archival, popular, intellectual, and political dimensions of the Sino-Western encounter to historicize the processes of knowledge production and transcultural boundary making in the age of empire. A central concern of the study is to find out whether such a multidimensional interdisciplinary study may shed new light on the history of Sino-Western contact or other transimperial encounters.This book does not seek to offer a comprehensive coverage of this period. Rather, by using a combination of case studies and selected themes and events to slice through history temporally and spatially, it hopes to illustrate the complex power dynamics in the contact zones of empire that have created some of the still influential ideas of Sino-Western difference, identities, and modernities at a time when these ideas remained seriously underdeveloped, contradictory, or contested. This book builds on critical scholarship in multiple disciplines to explore the intersection of the discourse of Chinese law and society, Euroamerican modern transformation, and imperial ideology and practice.The five substantive chapters of this book will be organized around the interrelated archival, intellectual, popular, and official domains of the production, circulation, consumption, and codification of the knowledge of Chinese law mostly from the 1740s to the 1840s. It begins by examining the imperial archives of Sino-Western legal disputes to reinterpret the origins of foreign extraterritoriality in Chapter 1 before moving on to explore how such disputes led to the production of Western knowledge of Chinese law and society in the next chapter. Chapter 3 then analyzes the reception and multifaceted influence of such knowledge on European debates about the ideals of modern law and government in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Related to such archival and intellectual discourses was the rise of popular and sentimental representations of Chinese judicial punishments that came to redefine Chinese and Western law and subjectivity in the nineteenth century, which is the subject of Chapter 4. Chapter 5 illustrates the influence of these archival, intellectual, and popular discourses of Chinese law and society on the decision making of British diplomats, traders, and politicians in waging the First Opium War, which then established by force extraterritoriality and the credibility of earlier narratives of Chinese law. The short conclusion will provide a detailed summary of the major arguments of the book and offer reflections on the subsequent Chinese efforts to engage with the Western discourse of Chinese law and culture in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.