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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 June 2006
It has long been recognized that, within traditional Chinese law and down to the present, civil disputes have had the potentiality of developing into criminal cases. This essay attempts to draw a dynamic picture of how legal troubles, both civil disputes and minor criminal cases, accelerated into major criminal ones. Section One discusses the pattern of such legal troubles in traditional and modern China. Section Two describes the mode by which such troubles were resolved, arguing that the resolution process is a kind of role-play between a third party, such as mediators, conciliators and judges, and those who are subject to their reasoning, such as plaintiffs and defendants. Section Three studies the conditions under which this operates. Third parties were not trusted, in terms of their fairness or competence, and thus they did not necessarily have the ability to settle disputes. Section Four examines the relation between crime and penalties in relation to these legal troubles, focusing particularly on how terms of punishment favoured lesser options.