Legal Lessons: Popularizing Laws in the People's Republic of China, 1949-1989

by Jennifer Altehenger

Overview

The popularization of basic legal knowledge is an important and contested technique of state governance in China today. Its roots reach back to the early years of Chinese Communist Party rule. Legal Lessons tells the story of how the party-state attempted to mobilize ordinary citizens to learn laws during the early years of the Mao period (1949–1976) and in the decade after Mao’s death.

Examining case studies such as the dissemination of the 1950 Marriage Law and successive constitutions since 1954 in Beijing and Shanghai, Jennifer Altehenger traces the dissemination of legal knowledge at different levels of state and society. Archival records, internal publications, periodicals, advice manuals, memoirs, and colorful propaganda materials reveal how official attempts to determine and promote “correct” understandings of laws intersected with people’s interpretations of written laws and with their experiences of laws in practice. They also show how diverse groups—including party-state leadership, legal experts, publishers, writers, artists, and local officials, along with ordinary people—helped to define the meaning of laws in China’s socialist society. Placing mass legal education and law propaganda at the center of analysis, Legal Lessons offers a new perspective on the sociocultural and political history of law in socialist China.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674251243
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	05/04/2021
Series:	Harvard East Asian Monographs , #411
Pages:	408
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Jennifer Altehenger is Associate Professor of Chinese History and Jessica Rawson Fellow in Modern Asian History at the University of Oxford.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

List of Illustrations xv

Abbreviations xvii

Introduction 1

Part I Preparations: 1949-1954

No Legalese, Please Why the Dissemination of Laws Became a Problem 27

2 Paper Trials How the Publishing Field Adapted to Law Propaganda 57

Part II Practices: 1950-1962

3 What Is a Basic Spirit? The Marriage Law and the Model Legal Education Campaign 89

4 Getting People to Abide by Law The Constitution Draft Discussion and Its Aftermath 127

Part III Revivals: 1970-1989

5 Constitutional Dilemmas Reworking Law Propaganda for a New Socialist Era 171

6 A New Type of Five-Year Plan Institutionalizing "Common Legal Knowledge" 213

Conclusion 247

Notes 261

Chinese Character List 315

Archival Files 325

Bibliography 337

Index 369

Editorial Reviews

A major scholarly accomplishment, Legal Lessons masterfully details how the Chinese state over forty years spread knowledge about law. By providing an extraordinarily deft portrayal of the deep internal conceptual and practical tensions that the party-state encountered in endeavoring to use law as a governing instrument, and the intricate ways in which China’s populace received and understood those messages, Altehenger shows that creating law for a new China was far more complex an undertaking than had previously been presumed.

William Alford

Drawing upon abundant archival records, internal reports, newspapers, and posters, Altehenger offers a fresh look into the CCP’s campaigns of disseminating legal knowledge. Her vivid accounts not only demonstrate the significant role of mass legal education in China’s socialist governance, but also disclose the complex dynamics between party leaders, propaganda officials, state and private publishers, and cultural workers in various campaigns.

Pacific Affairs - Weiting Guo

This is a beautifully researched and illuminating study of how the Chinese communist state has struggled to popularize laws since the 1950s through campaigns around the Marriage Laws, various drafts of the constitution, and more general legal awareness. It demonstrates the importance of law to the communist state throughout its history and the crucial role of culture and the media in how law has been understood.

Henrietta Harrison

This terrific book makes a significant contribution to the understanding of propaganda in China as well as to the fields of law, politics and history of the PRC…Altehenger’s analysis contributes mightily to our understanding of the period that she examines, but also is useful in appreciating the dilemmas of law in China today.

China Quarterly - Pitman B. Potter

An important work for scholars interested in the cultural dimensions of the law, Maoist-era mass political campaigns, and the comparative study of socialist states.

Twentieth-Century China - Joshua Hill

When it seized power in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party abolished the modern legal codes of the Republican era and created ‘socialist law’ for the new People’s Republic. Altehenger places the Chinese experience firmly within the world of the ‘socialist brother countries.’ This is not a book about rule by law, but the story of rule by propaganda. Going far beyond legal history, it is a compelling study of the enduring political culture of a regime that still argues today that it need not abide by its own constitution.

William C. Kirby

With its wide-ranging implications, Legal Lessons is worth learning! It presents a whole new way to comprehend radical attempts made by the Chinese state to inculcate legal knowledge among the people—and thereby transform society—at pivotal moments in China’s recent past.

Karl Gerth

While the book is focused on China’s two most important urban centers, Altehenger’s careful work in the Beijing and Shanghai archives, complemented by local gazetteers and restricted internal documents, rewards readers with a multilayered depiction of cultural work in the PRC.

China Journal - Brian DeMare

A thorough and accessible account of a very complex and important topic, and it deserves wide readership. The book will prove especially helpful for researchers interested in the PRC legal system, Chinese legal history, China’s governance capacity, and its state-society relations.

China Review International - Ji Li

A pioneering account of how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) endeavored to use legal propaganda to mold ideological consciousness and valorize the disparate phases of its revolution between 1949 and 1989…Altehenger has filled a key gap in the literature on the PRC legal system with an engaging, richly sourced study that bridges multiple fields of scholarship…Her book will appeal to historians of modern China, culture, and law, as well as to observers of the contemporary PRC, and that is an exceptional feat.

Law and History Review - Glenn Tiffert

Legal Lessons links the practice of legal education in the early PRC to the larger international project of socialist lawmaking, and raises new questions about the relationship between legal propaganda, legal ‘reform,’ and the quest for new kinds of legal polities in the late twentieth century and beyond. Altehenger’s masterful study provides a critical foundation for understanding the Chinese path to that contested condition we call rule of law.

Madeleine Zelin

Exhaustively researched and methodologically innovative, Legal Lessons is a must-read not only for PRC historians but also for legal historians of China and elsewhere. It redresses a glaring paucity of scholarship in an important field and provides a deeply textured narrative of the continued tussle between state and society over the varied meanings of law. By crossing important epochal divides, it also places China’s ongoing legal reforms in their proper historical context to demonstrate how they were not exclusively inventions of the post-Mao government seeking to rebuild its political legitimacy and rejoin the global economy.

PRC History Review - Philip Thai