China's Legal Concepts & Legal Evolution (SD 604)


This course gives you a glimpse of China's legal concepts and legal evolution. China is a vast country with a long history. China today is still deeply influenced by its traditions, culture, and customs. In this course I will introduce some very important scholars, and then sweep through 2000 years of Chinese history to modern times. During the late Qing dynasty, China started to interact with Western countries more frequently. Those periods are a crucial point in the development of China. There were many tremendous historic events that happened in China. We will study these. And we will learn to sense the Chinese rules of law by exploring many interesting historic events. The Chinese started to reform many legal codes in the late Qing dynasty, and they did enact some very high standards in the 1930s. Those codes are still working in Taiwan. When the communists and communism took over China in 1949, they dramatically changed the people's life's style. The Chinese people soon also changed their way of thinking after a few decades. It wasn't until the 1980s, that Mainland China began to resume its process of legal modernization. Nevertheless, various political orders and directives, rather than the rule of law, have dominated different levels of Chinese government, entities, and private parties in the past years. In the meantime, despite an increasing emphasis on market economy, socialist ideologies remain prominent. This political context, and other traditional concepts, have posed more challenges than ever to China's ongoing efforts toward legal modernization. Through studying the history and development of China and its legal system, you will learn to understand your own country, Western culture, and Western values.


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