Trial of Modernity: Judicial Reform in Early Twentieth-Century China, 1901-1937

摘要

What is Chinese law? What is legal in Chinese law, and what is Chinese? Should these two aspects be placed in opposition as the expression of "Western modernity" and "Chinese tradition and culture" respectively, so that the former can progress only to the detriment of the latter? Such basic questions, which have consistently confronted historians of Chinese legal modernization, find new answers in the three books under review.