Abrogation and Its Discontents: Towards New Paradigms of PRC Law and the 1949 Revolution

Fired by ideological zeal, in 1949 the Chinese Communist Party promptly abrogated the Nationalist legal system by fiat, vowing to erect an authentically revolutionary successor in its place. Ever since, official sources have portrayed abrogation as nothing less than the opening gambit in the PRC legal system’s creation.

Scholars remain largely in the thrall of that narrative. Abrogation lies at the core of their conceptual armature, which grounds the legal system’s identity in a lineage shorn of Chinese sources beyond the CCP. This distorts their grasp of the 1949 revolution, and of the origins, trajectory, and character of the legal system, and tends to reduce PRC legal history to little more than a branch of Party history.

The talk challenges this way of seeing and the creation myths that spring from it. First, the talk surveys the conventional discourse on abrogation, including some of the recent historiographical debates within it. Second, the talk contests the empirical foundations of that discourse using previously untapped archival sources that explode standard portrayals of the 1949 revolutionary divide by revealing unheralded dissension within the CCP on the question of abrogation, and powerful synchronic and diachronic exchanges between the Nationalist and CCP legal systems. Third, the talk shifts the discussion away from the worn ideological categories imposed by revolutionary historiography toward a novel conceptual framework informed by a synthesis of elements from systems and complexity theories that not only reconciles the PRC with Chinese time, but also better accounts for the observable impact of the 1949 revolution upon the present.

Glenn Tiffert is the Distinguished Post-Doctoral Fellow in Residence in the Study of China at the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests center on 20th century China, Chinese legal history, and computational analyses of modern Chinese textual corpora. He has published on the Chinese judiciary, Chinese constitutionalism, and current legal affairs. His forthcoming book is entitled: Judging Revolution: Beijing and the Birth of the PRC Judicial System (1906-1958).

Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies