This dissertation examines the prerevolutionary roots of the modern Chinese socialist approach to law. It focuses on the pivotal thirty-year period (1919-49) during which Chinese communist revolutionaries, in the remote hinterlands of China, forged new legal formulae, methods, and institutions out of three diverse legal strains--imperial Chinese tradition, Marxist-Leninist and early Soviet theory and practice, and revolutionary experiment.;The study is divided into two main parts. The first part begins with a description of the distinctive Chinese legal heritage, discussing imperial and Nationalist China's legal concepts, rules, and processes. It then traces the evolution of socialist legal doctrine from its theoretical origins in the works of Marx and Engels through its development and translation into practice during the first two decades of communist party rule in Soviet Russia. It concludes with a detailed comparison of the Chinese legal heritage and Soviet-style socialist law and an identification of areas of potential compatibility and conflict.;The second part, the major portion of the dissertation, considers the specific encounters between the Soviet and Chinese legal systems from 1919-49. It examines two very different approaches to law--one specifically formulated for China by Soviet leaders and the other created by Soviet communists in their own revolutionary struggle. While most Chinese revolutionaries were mechanically applying the legal directives dictated by Moscow, an independent wing of the Chinese Communist Party was developing its own legal policies, based partly on early Soviet Russian legal norms, rules, institutions, and procedures. The dissertation chronicles the process by which these rural activists gradually evolved the highly innovative "Maoist" approach to law that synthesized and supplemented Chinese and early socialist legal theory and practice. It concludes with a general discussion of this prerevolutionary sinification of socialist law and its possible implications for the subsequent development of the Chinese legal system, for comparative law concepts of reception of law, and for later P.R.C. attempts to import foreign legal patterns. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)
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