Study On The Sentencing Of The Crime Of Human Trafficking In The Qing Dynasty

On the one hand,traditional China allowed the trading of slaves;on the other hand,it severely cracked down on the trafficking of commoners.Until the Qing Dynasty,the newly-increased bannerman class and legislation tacitly allowed people to have slaves,leading to increased demand and creating a soil where grey or illegal human trafficking could easily occur.In order to maintain the feudal order and ethical principles,the Qing government kept cracking down on the crime of buying and selling people,and legislation was one of the important means.The laws against the crime of people trafficking in the Qing Dynasty mainly consists of the trafficking regulations and the trafficking precedents.The former was inherited from the legislation of the Ming Dynasty,which stipulated two types of basic crime behaviors:trafficking by force and trafficking by deception,as well as the legislative concept that the hosts,buyers and intermediaries commit the same crime as the criminals.Moreover,in the trafficking regulations it also stipulated the adjustment of sentencing for the crime of trafficking between commoners and outcasts,and between superiors and inferiors,which reflected the superior status of masses and superior seniors in the face of slaves and inferior juniors.The sentencing for human trafficking in the Qing Dynasty was relatively lenient compared to the Tang Dynasty.On the one hand,under the rule of the Yuan Dynasty,the concept of commoners and outcasts in society had become indifferent;On the other hand,it was also due to the legislation becoming more comprehensive,so the vicious crime of trafficking has been included in other laws.In the Qing Dynasty,the interpretation of "Lue" gradually shifted the priority from forcible looting to deceptive trafficking,which was considered to involve a lower degree of violence.The trafficking precedents fully reflected the flexibility of legislation in the Qing Dynasty.Through them,the content and sentencing of the trafficking regulations were supplemented and adjusted,where the general sentencing of the trafficking of women and children was raised to imprisonment with a reprieve from hanging.There was also flexible legislation for real-time crackdowns on serious human trafficking behaviors somewhere,such as legislating the maximum penalty to impose punishment on capital gangsters or southwest Sichuan traffickers.These precedents were able to effectively combat the crime of violent human trafficking that seriously impacted the feudal social order,and were almost standing idle afterward.The statutes of the Qing Dynasty further perfected the influence of status relations such as superiority and inferiority on the sentencing of human trafficking crimes.For the act of trafficking the superior as an inferior that was not mentioned in this law,the sentencing was raised to imprisonment with a reprieve from hanging to show fairness;it defined the legal identity of servants,and it supplemented the aggravated circumstances involving adultery in deceptive trafficking crimes between superiors and inferiors.The sentencing features of the trafficking precedents include multiple references to the conviction and sentencing of responsible officers in order to prevent them from colluding with traffickers;focusing on rectifying the current serious behaviors of human trafficking;and rarely distinguishing between the cases of trafficking people as slaves,wives,concubines,and offspring anymore,which showed that the Qing government prioritized cracking down on vicious crimes of human trafficking rather than driving commoners to become outcasts,and further proved that in the Qing society,the concept of commoners and outcasts had gradually declined.