The powerful central argument of Ting Zhang's new monograph, Circulating the Code, is that early modern transformations in the history of print and publishing—perhaps more than state policies—substantially influenced the formation and use of legal knowledge in Qing China. Enabled by the cheapness and vast circulation of print, a striking array of legal publications enabled both officials and ordinary members of Chinese society to put legal knowledge to use. Drawing primarily on methodological approaches from book history and legal history, the book also invokes questions regarding social cohesion, political authority, and the circulation of knowledge and information in early modern society.
Topically, Circulating the Code progresses in a rough top-down direction. Its five chapters discuss imperial institutions and policy towards legal publishing, commercial editions of the Qing Code, official readings of legal books, popular handbooks for litigation masters, and finally popular legal education as embedded in community lectures and other forms of public address. The book documents sources with exceptional clarity. The primary source base includes 131 distinct editions of the Qing Code (11 official and 120 commercial), 65 litigation handbooks, 15 manuals for community lectures, and myriad other administrative handbooks, official's diaries, and legal cases. These sources, which are amply analyzed for their material characteristics, were located by the author in numerous libraries in China, Japan, and the United States. In addition, she draws on archival collections that have become increasingly standard resources for Qing historians, including central government materials from the First Historical Archives, and documents from the Nanbu, Ba, and Dan-Xin County archives.
As Zhang explains, during the Qing period, the corpus of “law” in use expanded beyond the basic statutes of the Qing Code. This transition both gave rise to and was influenced by changes in policy and publishing. To be more specific, while the number of statutes remained stable throughout the dynasty, the number of substatutes grew from 449 to 1,892. Given that the court expected substatutes to be in force the day after they were promulgated (19), officials and legal advisors were at pains to learn about them. Often, the statutes and substatutes alone were not sufficient in guiding a judicial decision. One could then turn to case precedents, themselves a growing body of legal knowledge.
The Qing court simply could not keep up with releasing new editions of these essential supplementary materials. By the eighteenth century, this information gap had sparked the formation of an active corps of legal publishers in Hangzhou, who engaged in publishing novel editions of the Qing Code and other legal books. Strikingly, Hangzhou was not previously known as a publishing center. Hangzhou and other nearby cities were, however, home to many serving and would-be scholar-officials, as well as clerks, legal advisors, and other specialists in official work. They outfitted their books with prefaces solicited from more prestigious colleagues, and, over the years, reshaped the legal canon to suit the needs of legal advisor peers. For that reason, the three-register printing format employed in the so-called Comprehensive Integration edition of the Code became so influential that all other editions—including official editions—followed in its wake.
By my reading, the three-register format was an information revolution, not merely an aesthetic choice. Three-register pages featured the imperially authorized Code in the bottom register; “statutory commentaries, administrative regulations and sanctions, case precedents, and other valid rules and regulations” in the middle register; and a cross-index in the top register (59–62). Zhang convincingly argues that the prominent inclusion of case precedents in commercial Code editions made judicial officials and their advisors more likely to consult and employ these precedents in decision-making. Because commentaries and precedents were selected by individual editors and publishers, they directly shaped legal practice.
In Chapters 3, 4, and 5, Zhang dismantles the long-held assumption that officials and commoners, for differing reasons, lacked legal knowledge. In these chapters, she closely investigates how readers acquired legal knowledge from the Code and other types of legal text and education. In Chapter 3, thorough investigation of various officials’ personal accounts of reading about law in legal books and administrative handbooks lends weight to this argument. Not only did officials have access to changing legal information in the form of commercial editions, but also they devised methods for understanding and incorporating often complex legal information into their judicial decisions. Zhang demonstrates that the Qing court in fact encouraged officials to build repertoires of legal knowledge, for instance by taking legal examinations, a practice employed intermittently in the eighteenth century. In the late Qing, governors sent appointees for training at the Provincial Auxiliary Court (fashen ju), just one of several contemporary initiatives to increase legal expertise among newly appointed officials.
Chapters 4 and 5 focus on secret litigation handbooks (songshi miben) and legal information related in community lectures (xiangyue), respectively. It is in these chapters that Zhang most effectively demonstrates the way that legal information reached non-elites, although she is careful to note limitations on our present-day ability to understand how ordinary people used the law in daily practice. Zhang points out that the proliferation of new modes and formats for the dissemination of legal information besides the official legal code actually reduced the centrality of the Code itself. Subjects—from official elites down to frontier peoples—were aware not only of the law, but of its complexity and malleability.
The book's conclusion makes comparisons to early modern England and briefly follows the later development of law in twentieth-century China. In early modern England, technological innovations (the printing press) led to a publishing revolution that was nonetheless substantially restrained by the state in the realm of law. In Qing China, by contrast, use of older technologies intensified and became more widespread, and the state's control was more limited. These insights reveal that hidebound claims about state control of law in early modern China are more the result of cultural assumptions than historical reality. Having shown that legal practice in Qing China compared favorably to that in early modern England, Zhang strives to argue that the “modernization” of law and legal culture did not begin solely in late-nineteenth-century legal reform projects, but rather originated from the widespread growth of legal knowledge in the Qing, the rise of non-official legal experts, diminishing government control over legal knowledge and judicial practice, and the increasing importance of case precedents in judicial practice (186–87). That said, did the legal reforms envisioned by late Qing jurists—or the legal transitions actually put into force in the late Qing and Republican period—follow the four trends identified? Were there traces of Qing-era practice in the new legal regime of the People's Republic? Certainly we can see a clear line between the rise of non-official legal advisors and the development of a legal profession, but did twentieth-century regimes so willingly cede government control to the marketplace?
These questions notwithstanding, this book is a substantial and highly readable contribution to scholarship on law in early modern China. Among recent works in legal and print history, Zhang's work is unique in its focus on reception of legal knowledge and its careful consideration of how visual and tactile experiences of legal books influenced their readers. Although it takes the form of a research monograph aimed at China specialists, the book has wider appeal, given that it answers many questions perennially asked in undergraduate surveys regarding the intersections of state, society, and law in early modern China. Throughout, Zhang also engages comparisons to European history, not just in the area of print history, but also in the history of law, legal culture, and reading. Combined with the book's exceedingly clear style, these comparisons should make the book accessible to historians working on other regions.
