The development and evolution of ancient Chinese legal thought and its main features?

The Development and Evolution of Ancient Chinese Legal Thought and Its Main Characteristics

The Historical Development of Chinese Legal Thought

From its inception to the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC), Chinese legal thought has gone through different stages of development in slave society, feudal society, semi-colonial and semi-feudal society, and the various stages of development of these three kinds of societies due to the qualitative change of some of them. Its development can be divided into four periods:

Summer, Shang, Western Zhou period The formation and development of Chinese slave society, at that time as the ruler of the slave aristocracy, in the field of ideology, is mainly the use of "commanded by heaven" of the idea of the divine law and "pro pro", "pro", "pro", "pro", "pro", "pro", "pro", "pro", "pro", "pro", "pro", "pro", "pro", "pro", and "pro". The ideological realm of the slave-owning aristocracy was dominated by the idea of divine law, which was "commanded by heaven," and the idea of patriarchy, which took "kinship" and "honor" as its guiding principles. The dominant legal thought of the time was also governed by these two.

The most prominent representative of this period was the Duke of Zhou, a statesman in the early Western Zhou Dynasty. He drew lessons from the end of the Shang ruler's brutal oppression of the people and thus was overthrown, paid more attention to the people's hearts and minds, and asked the Western Zhou aristocracy to take Yin as a model, advocated "virtue and prudence", and the use of morality and punishment, opposed to the "sinners to the clan", and asked for a distinction between negligence ("cataract of the eye"), and "punishment of the eye", and "punishment of the eye". "cataract of the eye") and intentional ("non-cataract of the eye"), occasional offenses ("non-terminal") and recidivism ("only terminal"), in order to narrow the scope of the blow. This was rare in the history of criminal law in the whole world at that time. He also revised the theocratic legal thinking of the Yin and Shang dynasties, and put forward the doctrine of the divine right of the ruler "to match virtue with heaven", and moved from purely focusing on human rights to focusing on human resources, which provided favorable conditions for legal thinking to initially get rid of the constraints of the divine right. He also "made the rites and music", guided by the principles of "kissing" and "honoring", and improved the ritual system of the Western Zhou Dynasty, laying a foundation for the consolidation of the rule of the Western Zhou Dynasty.

Spring and Autumn and Warring States Period China's transition from a slave society to a feudal society is a period of change, but also the most active period of political and academic thinking in ancient China, the emergence of a "hundred schools of thought" of the prosperity of the situation. At this time, the legal thought also got unprecedented development, and in-depth to the field of jurisprudence, many thinkers on the origin of the law, the nature, the role of the law and the law and the socio-economic, the requirements of the times, the state power, ethical morality, customs and habits, the natural environment of the relationship between the basic issues put forward a series of new insights with a reasonable factor, greatly enriched the Chinese and even the whole world's ancient jurisprudence.

Qin, Han and Opium War Period From the establishment of the Qin Dynasty in 221 B.C. to the Opium War in 1840, it was a period of slow development to gradual decline of Chinese feudal society. The Qin Dynasty, which unified China, was founded under the guidance of Legalism. Since the Legalists advocated the "rule of law" and consistently emphasized the construction of the legal system, by the time of Qin Shi Huang, "all aspects of the law" had been put in place, contributing to the establishment and consolidation of a united, multi-ethnic, feudal and centralized state. This is further confirmed by the Qin Laws recorded in the Sleeping Tiger Land Qin Brief unearthed in 1975. However, emphasizing the legal system is not the same as emphasizing jurisprudence. The Qin dynasty practiced extreme authoritarianism in politics and culture, "all matters of the world, no matter how big or small, were decided by the top", and only allowed "law as a teaching", "officials as teachers", and strictly prohibited private study. This not only stifled other schools of thought, but also hindered the development of legal thought, including the Legalists themselves. The Qin dynasty also pushed the harsh and severe laws advocated by the Legalists to the extreme, relying on violence to impose exorbitant taxes and abuse the people's power, which finally provoked a great uprising of peasants and was soon replaced by the Western Han dynasty. The period from the establishment of the Qin Dynasty in 221 B.C. to the Opium War in 1840 was a period of slow development and gradual decline of feudal society in China. The Qin Dynasty, which unified China, was founded under the guidance of Legalism. Since the Legalists advocated the "rule of law" and consistently emphasized the construction of the legal system, by the time of Qin Shi Huang, "all aspects of the law" had been put in place, contributing to the establishment and consolidation of a united, multi-ethnic, feudal and centralized state. This is further confirmed by the Qin Laws recorded in the Sleeping Tiger Land Qin Brief unearthed in 1975. However, emphasizing the legal system is not the same as emphasizing jurisprudence. The Qin dynasty practiced extreme authoritarianism in politics and culture, "all matters of the world, no matter how big or small, were decided by the top", and only allowed "law as a teaching", "officials as teachers", and strictly prohibited private study. This not only stifled other schools of thought, but also hindered the development of legal thought, including the Legalists themselves. The Qin dynasty also pushed the strict and harsh laws advocated by the Legalists to the extreme, relying on violence to impose exorbitant taxes and abusing the people's power, which finally provoked a great uprising of peasants, and was soon replaced by the Western Han dynasty.

The Chinese bourgeoisie was weak. After the Xinhai Revolution overthrew the feudal empire, the fruits of the revolution were usurped by the Beiyang warlords. "Before and after the May Fourth Movement, as a result of the victory of the October Revolution in Russia, the spread of Marxism-Leninism in China, and the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, Marxist-Leninist jurisprudence was also introduced into China, becoming a sharp weapon for criticizing all kinds of old legal views and guiding the legislative and judicial practice of the revolutionary bases in the later years. The Kuomintang government, which inherited the mantle of the Beiyang government, said verbally that "the party complies with the legacy of Premier Sun Yat-sen, and is responsible for the establishment of the Republic of China", and said that it wanted to implement the "Three Principles of the People" and the "Five-Power Constitution", and that it wanted to build the Republic of China on the basis of the "Three Principles of the People" and the "Five-Power Constitution". "They stated that they would implement the Three Principles of the People and the Five Constitutional Rights, and that they would take the Three Principles of the People as the highest principle of jurisprudence, create the Three Principles of the People jurisprudence, and rebuild and revitalize the Chinese legal system. However, they only absorbed some of the things in Sun Yat-sen's thought that could be used by them, but completely turned their backs on his revolutionary and democratic essence, especially the three major policies of alliance with Russia, alliance with ****, and assistance to the peasants and laborers. Therefore, some of their official scholars believe that the new Chinese legal system should "preserve the inherent morality of our country as the main", to be "based on" the rule of etiquette, and even proposed to pay attention to "how to maximize the use of patriarchal system and seek its effect again. "Basically, it was still the tone of the Rites School at the end of the Qing Dynasty. During this period, as the new democratic revolution had already entered the stage, there existed in the whole field of legal thought not only the official jurisprudence of the Kuomintang government, which had a strong color of fascist legal thought and was influenced by the sociological jurisprudence of R. Pound of the U.S.A., but also Marxist-Leninist jurisprudence and bourgeois democratic jurisprudence reflecting the demands of the national bourgeoisie, which was in opposition to it and growing in importance. In the prevailing situation, the laws and official jurisprudence of the Kuomintang government, though outwardly impossible to leave intact without bourgeoisization, actually worked mainly to uphold the feudal-buyout fascist rule and the anti-***anti-people laws of the Kuomintang government and its ideology.

The legal thought of the country has its different characteristics at different stages of development, but from an overall point of view, it has its own different from some countries or regions of the world with global characteristics. The most prominent of these is that Confucian legal thought, as the feudal orthodoxy, once dominated for a long time, and later, in the whole semi-colonial and semi-feudal society, it still plays a great role and penetrates into the field of bourgeois legal thought. Confucianism upheld the patriarchal system headed by the patriarch and the hierarchical system headed by the monarch. Under the rule of Confucianism, the legislative and judicial activities of successive generations have long been guided by the rituals and teachings centered on the "Three Principles". Confucianism advocates that virtue should be the principal and punishment the auxiliary, clear punishment and education, in its "rule of virtue", "benevolent government", including the content of the light levies and taxes, compassionate punishment and prudent killings in order to appropriately reduce the exploitation and oppression of the people, not only is conducive to the production of the society and the life of the people, and also conducive to the stabilization of the social order. It is a reasonable factor and has had a good influence on the legislation of later generations. However, the Confucian principle of virtue and punishment is only adopted by the rulers on the premise that the people's struggle has achieved certain results, which is often followed by tyrannical levies and harsh punishments. Confucianism also emphasizes righteousness over profit, as Confucius said, "The gentleman is a metaphor for righteousness, while the villain is a metaphor for profit", in order to prevent the exploiters from competing with each other, especially to prevent the working people from opposing the exploiters with vested interests in order to defend their own labor gains or to reclaim the fruits of their own labor. The Song and Ming philosophies, which were the orthodoxy of Confucianism in the late feudal period, drew on the ideas of Buddhism and Taoism to advocate "the survival of the principles of heavenly justice and the extinction of human desires", describing the "Three Principles" as "the principles of heavenly justice" and the struggle for basic rights and the internal violation of the rulers' rights to survive as well as the fight for the basic rights. The struggle for the basic rights of the people and the ruler's internal violation of the "Three Principles" thought, speech and behavior as "human desires", which more seriously suppressed people's concept of rights and hindered the development of legal thought. In addition, the idea of "righteousness rather than profit" is rooted in the tradition of emphasizing agriculture and suppressing commerce, aiming to maintain the feudal natural economy, but is not conducive to the development of the commodity economy and the corresponding "private law". Especially in the late feudal period, the growth of capitalism and the concept of legal rights, which was premised on the development of the commodity economy, was seriously hindered.

The above aspects in the Confucian orthodox legal thought into an organic whole centered on imperial power, guiding and dominating Chinese feudal legislation for thousands of years. This is unique among all legal systems in the world. Because the ancient Chinese (including the Middle Ages) society has always been based on natural economy, commodity production and exchange are not developed, and by the Confucian orthodox thought of the serious constraints, so at that time there is no way as Engels said, the formation of "a class of professional scholars of law".