This chapter considers the socioeconomic functionality of legal codes and codification through the lens of late imperial Chinese legal history. Specifically, it asks whether formal legal codes can wield significant influence over private socioeconomic behavior despite being poorly enforced—or even unenforced—and whether such influence derives, in part, from the symbolic value of codification itself. It argues that the answer to both questions is likely “yes,” at least in the context of Qing Dynasty private law. This contains potentially generalizable insights into the nature of legal authority and prestige, some of which may potentially be applied to the recent passage of the Chinese Civil Code in 2020.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

Although China’s Taiping Rebellion (1851-64) is perhaps history’s bloodiest civil war it has remained largely beyond the purview of genocide scholars, and its historiography has generally portrayed it as a “progressive” or “revolutionary” movement. This essay argues, however, that in its alien ideology derived from Protestantism and pre-Confucian millenarianism guided by the visions of Hong Xiuquan (1813-1864); radical attempts at social leveling; dismantling of Confucian culture and society; and elimination of select ethnic and religious groups, this attempt to create a theocratic “heavenly kingdom of great peace” (taiping tianguo) bears the hallmarks of current definitions of genocide and departs in crucial ways from even the most massive and sanguinary conflicts marking the Chinese past.

Enslavement and punitive deportations from the south to the north of what is today the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (in northwest China) have been a feature of this region’s history. This chapter considers various reflections of captivity at the hands of both the Junghar Mongols (ca. 1690–1750) and the Qing Dynasty (from the 1750s onward) in literature produced by the Muslims of the Tarim Basin, that is, today’s Uyghurs. Enslavement by the infidel is a common trope of local hagiographic literature, which taps into Quranic narrative models of exile and deliverance. Alongside these narratives of charismatic male figures, folk songs mourning the experience of captivity also produced a set of popular female heroines in Uyghur literature. The most widely disseminated of these victim narratives, that of Nazugum, circulated in various forms in the late Qing, and after the dynasty’s fall became an important allegory of nationalist resistance among Uyghurs in both China and the Soviet Union.

Chapter 1 examines the imperial silencing regime in Hong Kong from the early colonial years to the turn of the nineteenth century, a regime I call ‘punitive censorship’. The chapter details how for the first fifty years of British rule in Hong Kong following its inception in 1841, criminal prosecutions under libel law were wielded by the colonial government as the major tool against newspaper editors who criticised government officials and/or policies. Libel prosecutions aimed not only to suppress criticism of the colonial government but also to manage Britain’s geopolitical interests in East Asia, particularly its relationship with China. In addition to suppressing the Hong Kong press through judicial proceedings, the colony’s censorship regime also featured legislative measures that, for example, forbade the import of anti-colonial materials into Hong Kong

The ideas and practices of constitutions and constitutionalism were first imported into China in the late 19th century. There were three eras of constitution-making in modern Chinese history: the last decade of Qing imperial rule, the republican era, and the communist era. Dr Sun Yat-sen, founding father of the Republic of China (RoC), developed a three-stage theory of China’s political development in which the last stage was to be constitutionalism (xianzheng). Although this was realized in theory when the RoC Constitution of 1946 was enacted, the Constitution became largely suspended as the RoC regime moved to Taiwan and introduced martial law after its defeat by the Communists in the Chinese Civil War. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) was established in the Mainland, which witnessed a new era of constitution-making under the Soviet Union’s influence. However, even today, the discussion of “constitutionalism” (xianzheng) is still discouraged by the PRC regime, although the concepts of the (socialist) Rule of Law and human rights have been affirmed by constitutional amendments. This chapter will review and assess the history of constitution-making in modern China and the discourse of constitutional law scholarship in contemporary China, and it will explore how the case of China both illuminates and challenges conventional understandings of the meaning and significance of constitutions and constitutionalism in the contemporary world.

East Asian religions are marked by diffuse spirituality and close ties to the state (e.g. Confucianism). When the state was weak, however, independent sects gained an appeal, which created a niche for Christianity. On the other hand, a resurgent state brought repression of these groups. Early modern Japan is the most vivid example, but also in China at the same time in milder form. The Taiping rebellion is a nineteenth-century example. Missionary incursion sparked resistance (the Boxer rebellion) but also acculturation (Western education). Japanese nationalism coopted Christianity through WW II, but its appeal has been limited since. Korea exemplifies how persecution of Christianity, first by its Confucian monarchs, then by the Japanese and then the communists, only strengthened its appeal.

Chapter 2 focuses on the expansion of pro-market trends and how it came to influence Qing policies. It also discusses the economic developments that inspired the rise of pro-luxury consumption ideas from the late Ming period to the early nineteenth century. In this context it examines the writings of a variety of scholars and intellectuals including Lu Ji (1515–52) and Tang Zhen (1630–1704), the two most prominent pro-luxury advocates.This chapters also illustrate the elasticity of the Confucian discourse on the economy and its ability to adapt to actual changes in the economy of the empire, challenging the notion that Confucian ideology led to intellectual immobility.

Chapter 4 illustrates the developments of the trends originated in the late Qing in support for state intervention on the economic and how they came to influence the political thought of the 1920s and 1930s. These trends led to economic solutions that tended to marginalize the market, including Jiang Jieshi’s New Life Movement (1935) – a fascist vision of frugal modernity – and various projects of economic cooperation (the Cooperative Society Movement). This period witnessed an intensification of the tension between treaty-port consumerist trends and economic decline in the rural hinterland, as well as that between the nation-building perspective of the state – which focused on developing the country as a whole – and the treaty port-based view of consumerist modernity. In addition, an escalating sense of crisis and need of decisive action to save the nation from the mounting threat from Japanese expansionist imperialism brought to a special admiration of fascist models of “controlled economy” (tongzhi jingji) such as Italy, Germany, and Japan.

Chapter 3 examines the early nineteenth-century return of the idea of limited resources and the decline of the notion that market-based luxury consumption could have a positive effect on the economy. It is at this time that population growth, together with the rural–coastal gap, appeared to require curbing of luxury consumption of resources and a return to state intervention. By this time trade and manufacturing had been widely accepted as an important component of the economy. Chinese intellectuals and reformers, however, believed that the stimulating power of consumption should be channeled away from luxury goods and deployed in support of the production of daily-need goods as a means of solving the poverty crisis. This chapter also discusses the early impact of Western ideas of economic liberalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and how these ideas were received by Chinese intellectuals and reformers. Western imperialism led to a shift in the main conceptual parameters of the economic discourse from dynastic stability to defensive nation-building. Pro-frugality policies acquired a new popularity in the context of confrontation with Western models of evolutionary modernity, the rise of defensive economic nationalism, and the return of the idea of economic scarcity (poverty).