Civil justice in early twentieth-century Northeast China : Fengtian Province, 1900-1928

Drawing upon court files in the Liaoning Provincial Archives, this dissertation addresses the question of the transformation of the civil justice system in Fengtian Province in the early twentieth century. Fengtian Province was among the few provinces where judicial-legal reforms were first launched during the late Qing's New Policies period. In the early Republic, judicial-legal reforms were continuously pursued under the governance of the warlord Zhang Zuolin. The accommodation of judicial-legal modernity within warlord politics was a result of the simultaneous presence of local elite activism, nationalism and the dominance of republican ideology.To demonstrate judicial-legal modernity in this frontier province, this dissertation covers four main areas: the bureaucratization of the court system and mediation mechanism; the formalization of civil procedures; the "discovery" and modernization of custom in judicial process; and the narrowing of the power disparity in gender in divorce law and practice.The bureaucratization of the court system reveals not only the tendency of separating judicial power from executive power, but also the professionalization of judicial officials, including lower-level judicial personnel. The bureaucratization of mediation locates the point at wards under the ward-village system implemented in the 1920s by the Fengtian provincial authority. The ward head, as a salaried sub-village government official was able to exercise his power to mediate civil disputes. This point epitomizes the early effort made by the modern state to interfere in the arena of popular justice. The formalization of civil procedures reflects the transformation of court practice from a simple, customary way of finding facts and applying laws to a practice guided by a complex, codified procedural law based on a Germanic-Japanese model. In speaking of the "discovery" and modernization of custom, I address not only the phenomena of "discovering" local customs and recognizing them as a source of authority for adjudicating cases by judges who had modern legal training, but also of the elaborate, selective screening policy towards custom, ushered in by the Supreme Court due to their concern with public policy and social morals. Narrowing the power disparity in gender is examined in the light of changes to divorce law and practice. By following the precedents laid down by the Supreme Court, the lower courts attempted to readdress the unbalanced power relationship between men and women inherited from Qing law