This talk will a part of Chinese 242A - Chinese Classics and Exegetical Traditions.
Tuesday, November 17, 2026
3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
Royce Hall 148
This talk will present an outline of a work in progress. It will elaborate various social and political roles of law in the centuries leading up to the creation of the first empires, and in the Qin and Han dynasties. It incorporates the large body of legal and administrative materials recovered in recent decades, regularly comparing the Chinese case with ancient Greece and Rome (and occasionally Mesopotamia).
The topics treated will include:
1) The role of violence, specifically how law emerged in and was shaped by the wars in which rising territorial states destroyed one another and, more importantly, the Zhou nobility. This will include how the laws in the new states absorbed, restructured, and preserved in hidden fashion the roles and powers of that nobility. Here the comparison with the Greek case will be brought to the fore.
2) The impact of the writing and codification of laws. This will include writing as a defining activity of the emergent state administrators, writing as a means of standardizing regulations across vast territorial expanses, and writing as a new form of language that figured prominently in the relations (often adversarial) between local customs and state law.
3) The role of law in shaping the participants in the new state order. This will include the aforementioned administrators, both in their political activities and in their tensions with many of the philosophers or literary men, and also the common people who participated in the state through such forms as taxation, military service, and the hierarchy of ranks that were all elaborated in the legal order. The key role of convicts in both these groups will also be touched on.
4) Law as a major ground for the interaction of politics and philosophy. Here the newly discovered materials offer little, but the interplay of law and philosophy in the Greek and Roman cases suggests new insights into the Chinese case.
Mark Edward Lewis is the Kwoh-ting Li Professor Emeritus of Chinese at Stanford University. He has written a dozen monographs on aspects of China’s early and middle periods, as well as numerous articles.
Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies