Concubines in Court: Marriage and Monogamy in Twentieth-Century China

摘要

Focusing on the history of concubinage through the lens of the law, Lisa Tran's book illuminates the significance of the shifts of the relationship between marriage and sex in the first half of the 20th century as new ideals of monogamy and equality were introduced into the Chinese legal, social and cultural contexts. This book not only aims to show the continuities and discontinuities of the legal treatments of concubinage from the early Republican era to the first years of the People's Republic of China (PRC), but also "seeks to de-emphasize the 1949 divide" (p. 14), which Tran conceptualizes as more than a historical marker highlighting the ideological and political differences between two regimes, through a juxtaposition of the Kuomintang (KMT) and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) legal codes and practices on concubinage.