 |
Business | Industries | Finance | Tax |
| Index: > A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z |
|
|||||
| First Prev [ 1 2 3 ] Next Last |
The teachings of Confucius have had an enduring effect on Chinese life and have provided the basis for the social order through much of the country's history. Confucians believed in the fundamental goodness of man and advocated rule by moral persuasion in accordance with the concept of li (propriety), a set of generally accepted social values or norms of behavior. Li was enforced by society rather than by courts. Education was considered the key ingredient for maintaining order, and codes of law were intended only to supplement li, not to replace it (see Hundred Schools of Thought).
Confucians held that codified law was inadequate to provide meaningful guidance for the entire panorama of human activity, but they were not against using laws to control the most unruly elements in the society. The first criminal code was promulgated sometime between 455 and 395 B.C. There were also civil statutes, mostly concerned with land transactions. The Confucian notion that morality and self-discipline was more important than legal codes causes many historians, such as Max Weber, until the mid-20th century to conclude that law was not an important part of Imperial Chinese society. This notion, however, has come under extreme criticism and is no longer the conventional wisdom among Sinologists, who have concluded that Imperial China had an elaborate system of both criminal and civil law which was comparable to anything found in Europe.
Legalism, a competing school of thought during the Warring States period, maintained that man was by nature evil and had to be controlled by strict rules of law and uniform justice. Legalist philosophy had its greatest impact during the Qin Dynasty.The Han Dynasty retained the basic legal system established under the Qin but modified some of the harsher aspects in line with the Confucian philosophy of social control based on ethical and moral persuasion. Most legal professionals were not lawyers but generalists trained in philosophy and literature. The local, classically trained, Confucian gentry played a crucial role as arbiters and handled all but the most serious local disputes.
During the Qing dynasty, criminal justice was based on a written and extremely detailed criminal code. One element of the traditional Chinese criminal justice system, which still influences modern Chinese views toward law, is the notion that criminal law has a moral element and that one important element of criminal law was to get the defendant to repent and see the error of his ways. In the traditional Chinese legal system, a person could not be convicted of a crime, unless they confessed. This often led to the use of torture, in order to extract the necessary confession. All capital offenses were reported to the capital and required the personal approval of the Emperor of China.
There was no civil code separate from the criminal justice code, which led to the now discredited belief that traditional Chinese law had no civil law. More recent studies have demonstrated that most of the magistrates legal work was in civil disputes, and that there was an elaborate system of civil law which used the criminal code to establish tortIn the common law, a tort is a civil wrong for which the law provides a remedy. The term comes from Law French and means, literally, 'a wrong'. The "law of torts" is a body of civil law or private law that covers the various legal ( money damages) and equs.
In the late Qing dynasty there was a concerted effort to establish legal codes based on European models. Because of the German victory in the Franco-Prussian WarMars-la-Tour, August 16, 1870 The Franco-Prussian War ( July 19, 1870 May 10, 1871) was waged between the Empire of France and the Prussian led North German Confederation allied with the south German states of Baden, Bavaria and Wurttemberg. The conflict and because JapanJapan (, Nippon/Nihon literally "the origin of the sun") is a country in East Asia situated on a chain of islands east of the Asian continent on the western edge of the Pacific Ocean. The largest of these islands are, from north to south, Hokkaido , Honsh was used as the model for political and legal reform, the law codes which were adopted were modelled closely after that of GermanyThe Federal Republic of Germany ( German: Bundesrepublik Deutschland is one of the world's leading industrialized countries, located in the middle of the European Union. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark and the Baltic Sea, to the east.
Attitudes toward the traditional Chinese legal system charged marked in the late-20th century. Most Chinese and Westerners of the early 20th century regarded the traditional Chinese legal system was backward and barbaric. However, extensive research into China's traditional legal system has caused attitudes to become more favorable in the late-20th and early 21st century. Whereas researchers of the early and mid-20th century tended to compare the traditional Chinese legal system to then comtemporary systems, finding the former to be backward, more recent research has tended to compare the 18th century Chinese legal system to European systems of the 18th century, and this has resulted in a far more positive view of traditional Chinese law.
| Politics | Business | Finance |
 |
 |
 |
|