Polyandry and Wife-Selling In Qing Dynasty China: Survival Strategies and Judicial Interventions
This article examines China’s first women’s prison in the context of diplomatic disputes, legal reforms, and gender order at the turn of the twentieth century. It shows that the custody of female offenders in the Shanghai International Settlement became a battleground in which the interests and perceptions of late imperial China and the Western authorities clashed. Under pressure from the Western authorities, the first Chinese women’s prison was established in 1907, even prior to the formal introduction of custodial sentences into China’s criminal code. Notably, the Chinese officials did not embrace prison as a more benevolent punitive institution; rather, they saw it more as a tool to consolidate its judicial sovereignty and preserve gender norms. For Chinese women, the prison, functioning as a re-cloistered feminine space, further entrenched the confinement of their bodies, thereby perpetuating rather than changing orthodox values of female chastity. This article questions the universal modernity of European penalties by pointing out that the introduction of imprisonment as a supposedly more civilized and humane form of punishment may have placed Chinese women at a greater disadvantage.
This article engages the views of PRC Confucian scholars who responded to the United States Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy's citing of Confucius in his majority opinion on same-sex marriage in 2015. It questions their separation of tolerance for homosexuality from legalization of same-sex marriage and argue that tolerance is not enough. The arguments in the mainland Confucian discourse about same-sex marriage highlights the historical and persistent entanglement of Confucianism with patriarchy. Instead of reviving traditional patriarchal society, further entrenching and increasing gender inequality, contemporary Confucianism could shape its own unique modern society that aspires to (and hopefully one day achieving) gender equality together with sexual inclusivity by deconstructing the patriarchal Confucian family and reconstructing a different Confucian family ideal. Accepting same-sex marriage would lend weight to the latter, and there are Confucian reasons for legalizing same-sex marriage and recognizing its ethical value.
This article investigates the impact of male migration on left-behind women in nineteenth-century Chongqing, focusing on the intersection among gender, migration, and religion. It analyze the unintended consequences of failed male migration, in which the husband's failure to send regular remittances was prone to cause tremendous anxiety and financial difficulties for his wife. In the absence of strong male-centered kinship organizations, Chongqingese women exploited unorthodox options to support themselves. Buddhist monasticism proved appealing because it provided both a stable source of livelihood and an inclusive all-female space. However, female renunciation was controversial because it challenged state-sponsored patriarchal values. Returned husbands enlisted the state's help in revoking their wives' religious decisions. Paradoxically, for vulnerable women like concubines, nunhood proved an attractive option because it helped them obtain migration-triggered divorces on favorable terms. They strategically synergized the bodily practice of monastic celibacy with the discourse of female chastity to assure their estranged spouses of lifelong commitments to non-remarriage. By doing so, these women succeeded in receiving generous financial compensation. This study highlights how the combination of religion and translocality enabled women to renegotiate their positionality within the patriarchy.
This study uses the genealogical records of 36,456 men from six Chinese lineages to test one of the fundamental assumptions of the Malthusian model: Did higher living standards result in increased reproduction? An empirical investigation of China between 1350 and 1920 finds a positive relationship between social status and net reproduction. Degree and office holders, or the literati, produced more than twice as many surviving sons as non-degree holders. The analysis explores the impact of social status on both the intensive and extensive margins of fertility—namely, reduction in child mortality and better access to marriages. The high income and strong kin network of the literati greatly contributed to their reproductive success.
This article explores women’s experiences during the White Lotus War (1796–1804), examining disparities related to the state’s calculation of women’s value as agents of institutional reproduction, sources of intelligence, and symbols of disorder. The state cared assiduously for widows of officers killed in battle, converting their grief into a commitment to raising sons as officers, while offering only meagre assistance to soldiers’ widows. Interrogators used female captives to verify identities of captured men, taking their emotions as evidence of attachment. Officials resettling female refugees treated them as threats to social order who need to be returned to families or remarried.
This special issue investigates the families arising from death and the remarriage of a parent to consider the outcomes for the children, parents and stepparents from 1550 to 1900. It investigates historical demography to establish the numbers and types of stepfamilies. The introduction sketches several themes such as: the lingering effects of parental loss; how remarriage shapes stepfamily patterns in Western and East Central Europe; the effects of being a stepchild; stepparent caregiving and the household economy; when illegitimate children become stepchildren; household structure, property and inheritance regimes; and avenues for future research. This stepfamilies issue explores the cleavages as well as similarities in stepfamilies from Western Europe to Eastern Europe and looks beyond the continent into the overseas territories of the Dutch and Portuguese empires.
En mai 2016, un colloque international était l’occasion de célébrer, à l’École française de Rome, le XXVe anniversaire de la parution de l’Histoire des femmes en Occident et le XXe anniversaire de la publication de la Storia delle donne in Italia, deux entreprises collectives dont l’éditeur italien Laterza avait été à l’origine. Le livre collectif issu de cette rencontre revient sur la genèse de ces ouvrages pionniers, leur réception et la solidité des acquis historiographiques dont ils sont le fruit en donnant tout d’abord la parole à Michelle Perrot et à quelques-unes des éditrices d’alors ; il s’efforce ensuite de rendre compte de l’extraordinaire évolution d’un champ d’études qui s’est enrichi en suivant les parcours déjà balisés par ces œuvres majeures, mais également en empruntant des directions plus inattendues. Plus de vingt éminent-e-s spécialistes font ainsi le point sur les thématiques les plus significatives qui, de nos jours, sont au cœur des questionnements de l’histoire des femmes et du genre, inscrite désormais dans une dimension globale : circulations, migrations et métissages, lois et droits, identités personnelles, familles et masculinités, économies et cultures matérielles.
In Imperial China, the idea of filial piety not only shaped family relations but was also the official ideology by which Qing China was governed. In State and Family in China, Yue Du examines the relationship between politics and intergenerational family relations in China from the Qing period to 1949, focusing on changes in family law, parent-child relationships, and the changing nature of the Chinese state during this period. This book highlights how the Qing dynasty treated the state-sponsored parent-child hierarchy as the axis around which Chinese family and political power relations were constructed and maintained. It shows how following the fall of the Qing in 1911, reform of filial piety law in the Republic of China became the basis of state-directed family reform, playing a central role in China's transition from empire to nation-state.
This chapter presents a systematic study of the often-ignored contractual scribes and provides a thorough account of the institution of scribes and its operation. In contrast to the impression of being a “printer,” this chapter argues that a scribe might not be as “powerful” as the middleman in the negotiation, but possesses the “power” of writing and therefore should be deemed one of the two underpinnings of a contract. This chapter is organized chronologically in accordance with the typical activity of a contractual scribe in the region, and, while clarifying the historical facts, also sheds some light on the basic workings of the scribe in the context of the Qingshui River region.
The article examines legal plaints authored by the household slaves, bondsmen, bonded tenants, concubine, wife, sisters, and affines of the chieftain of a native domain in northern Yunnan Province, China in 1760. These kin and enslaved persons of the chiefly house were struggling over whether a slave baby should become the chieftain of this sprawling realm. The documents were preserved in the hereditary house of the native chieftain along with some 500 manuscripts in an indigenous script now called Nasu, which carried its own assumptions about what writing was and what it could do. I read the Chinese-language legal documents with an eye to the tradition of Nasu ritual writing. I argue that a group of bondsmen accused of rebelling against the chiefly household were actually seeking to preserve it by extending the ritualized tasks of writing ancestry and descent into the realm of Qing legal practice. This allows me to extend the first of two methodological suggestions: that the kinship of bondage and the bondage of kinship are best seen as participating reciprocally in a single field of relations. I then follow a group of domestic slaves as they travel to the administrative city and search for a litigation master to write up their own legal plaint. With this exercise, I propose a second methodological argument: that reading and writing are complex human skills, often partly available even to those who cannot use pen and paper, and involving the coordination of forms of textuality across different planes of inscription.
In patriarchal, patrilineal societies, sons are valued over daughters. Korean women patronized the mudang or shamans, women marginalized by polite society who had the power to communicate with the spirits. Most women who joined the movement, Taiping rebellion, found that liberation from the inner quarters meant hard manual labor. Sex segregation meant that Chinese, Korean, and Japanese women played a much less public role in social protest than did their European counterparts. Nineteenth‐century internal dislocations and foreign threats transformed the lives of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean men and women. The economic turmoil and political crisis caused by the opening of treaty ports to foreign trade in the 1840s and population pressure in southeastern China are often cited as factors in the rise of the new religion known as the Taiping or “great peace.” The desire to preserve the core of Chinese culture meant that reform came comparatively late to China.
The historical study of sexuality offers glimpses of enduring patterns – in marriage and family life, in the influence of religious and philosophical traditions, and in the varied possibilities for alternative genders and sexualities. The study of the last few centuries shows us how changes in the modern world have altered these patterns – from global interconnections and the consequences of migration to the impact of scientific ideas, industrialization and urbanization, and notions of romance. The result has been new forms of sexual expression, attitudes, and identities, and the search for ever greater methods of sexual liberation. The global study of all these historical elements of sexuality permits us to see the similarities and differences from one world region to another as well as from one era of the past to another.
The Cambridge World History of Violence - edited by Robert Antony March 2020
This article examines the adoption of modern fingerprinting in early twentieth-century China through a case study of the Fingerprint Society, an association affiliated with the Ministry of Interior’s police academy that was active in 1920s Beijing. The members of this association viewed fingerprinting as both a technique that could be used to demonstrate China’s adoption of globally accepted standards of policing and justice and a body of academic knowledge that could form the basis for a would-be profession of fingerprinting experts. While the Fingerprint Society ultimately failed to accomplish its profession-building goals, its activities nonetheless shed light on an early moment in the history of new identification practices in China as well as on dynamics that have shaped the global history of fingerprinting as an area of modern expert knowledge located ambiguously between policing and science.
There are a large number of criminal cases in the Manchu archives, which occurred in Mongolia and Xinjiang and were reported to the Qing emperors. These criminal cases can be roughly divided into two groups: homicide cases and horse theft cases. Based on the records of the Manchu archives, this paper will focus upon horse theft cases in Xinjiang during the Qianlong reign. Xinjiang was a place populated by many ethnic groups under the Qing rule. In the Qing records, we found that almost all of the ethnic groups were involved in horse theft cases. The questions at issue are: why did such horse theft cases matter in the Qing dynasty, especially to the extent they even had to be reported to the central government and the Qing emperors? Based on what law were the criminals of different peoples punished in the judicial trials?
My arguments are as follows: based on the Qing records, one can learn that the legislation in Xinjiang had been less mature than that in China proper, and there had not been specific regulations or laws on criminal cases including horse theft being enacted by the Qing court in Xinjiang; the law was subject to variation based on the emperors’ own will, which largely reflects the limitations and challenges that the Manchu rulers were facing during their reign in such a newly-conquered multi-cultural territory. What is certain is: first, in general, the ethnicities of horse theft criminals and owners of the stolen horses were considered by the Qing magistrates, and the criminals were punished on the basis of their and the owners’ ethnicities, thus, a diversified statutory base appeared to be applied in these trials. Second, the punishment for criminals in horse theft in Xinjiang at the time was more severe than that in other parts of the Qing Empire, and the penalties were generally borrowed from that in Daqing lüli , which, to some extent, could reflect the strong influences of Chinese and Manchu legislation.
The scholarship on women, gender, the family, and sexuality produced in the last four decades represents some of the most exciting and consequential research on Chinese history. Focusing on women's agency and subjectivity, it brings to life a wide range of women's experiences and the central roles women played in the family. Taking a women-centered approach and using gender as a category of analysis, historians reveal a fluid gender system, demonstrating that gender norms, familial and marital practices, sexual behaviors were not static and uniform across space and time, but were mediated by class, historical forces, and local conditions. This scholarship has transformed our understanding not only of women's lives but also of Chinese history at large, shedding light on the role of the state, the shape and texture of social, economic, and cultural changes, and the extent of China's modern transformation in the twentieth century.
The history of World War II has long been a favorite topic of military, diplomatic, and social historians (even more so for viewers of the History Channel), but the focus has typically been on the European theater. ¹ With a more limited archival record, the conflict in Asia has received less attention. This is certainly not because Asia was less important. The war undermined the legitimacy of colonial regimes throughout Southeast Asia, led to the division of Korea into two hostile states, and contributed in fundamental ways to the collapse of the Nationalist regime in China and the triumph of the Communist revolution. The last few years have seen substantial new scholarship on the 1937–45 War of Resistance in China and what Japanese historians often call the Fifteen-Year War, starting with the occupation of Manchuria in 1931. ² The number of titles falls far short of what has been written on Europe, but the war in China is now being approached in new and interesting ways.
The incorporation of niche construction theory (NCT) and epigenetics into an extended evolutionary synthesis (EES) increases the explanatory power of evolutionary analyses of human history. NCT allows identification of distinct social inheritance and cultural inheritance and can thereby account for how an existing-but-dynamic social system yields variable influences across individuals and also how these individuals' microlevel actions can feed back to alter the dynamic heterogeneously across time and space. An analysis of Chinese footbinding, as it was ending during the first half of the twentieth century and China was industrializing, illustrates the evolutionary dynamics of niche construction across inheritance tracks and explains regional heterogeneity as well as the persistence of a cultural belief that was socially inaccurate. Incorporating anthropological and sociological insights into an EES with NCT has the potential to proffer source laws for relationships between individual actions and macro-patterns in beliefs, structures, climate, and demography.
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