The culmination of twenty years of research, this essential book completes distinguished historian Philip C. C. Huang's pathbreaking trilogy on Chinese law and society from late imperial times to the present. Huang shows how, at the level of ideology and theory, traditional Chinese law has been rejected time and again in the past century by China's own lawmakers, first in the late Qing and the republic, then in the revolutionary and Maoist periods of the People's Republic, and finally again in the current reform era. Considering legal theory alone, modern Chinese law can only be Western law, and past Chinese law-traditional or Maoist-can have no role under the leadership's current preoccupations with modernization and marketization. But what has actually happened historically at the level of judicial practice and the daily lives of common people? In exploring this central question, Huang draws on a rich array of court records and field interviews to illustrate the surprising strength of traditional Chinese civil justice. Albeit much altered, its legacy can be traced in informal and semiformal community justice (e.g., societal and cadres mediation), as well as in multiple spheres of court-administered formal civil justice, including property rights, inheritance and old-age maintenance, and debt obligations. He also identifies the influence of Maoist justice, especially its divorce and civil court mediation practices. Finally, despite the reform era's massive importation of Western laws, legal reasoning employed in judicial practice has shown remarkable continuity, with major implications for China's future legal system.

黄宗智，美籍华人。普林斯顿大学学士，华盛顿大学博士。自1966年毕业起即供职于加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶校区历史系，并因其在中国农村经济史研究方面有卓越贡献于1991年荣升“超级教授”。其后，转向法律史研究，再次发表两部开创性专著。1975年创办季刊《近现代中国》(Modern China)，乃美国研究中国首要学术刊物之一。2003年在国内创办《中国乡村研究》学刊。2005年受聘为人民大学农业与农村发展学院国家教育部“长江学者奖励计划讲座教授”；同时，担任清华大学人文与社会高等研究中心高级研究员。最近几年多用中文写作，发表论文多篇。主要著作有《法律、习俗、与司法实践：清代与民国的比较》、《清代的法律、社会、与文化：民法的表达与实践》、《中国研究的规范认识危机》、《长江三角洲的小农家庭与乡村发展》、《华北的小农经济与社会变迁》以及此集所收论文。