A Study Of Huang Zunxian's Legal Thought And Practice

China has gradually been reduced to be a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country from Qing Dynasty. Our national peril awakened a number of insights including Huang Zunxian who had a strong sense of political reform and started to explore the way out of China seriously.Huang Zunxian was successful not only in foreign affairs, education and poetry reformation, but also in the field of rules of law. His Legislation Thought of do what people want to do is still significant nowadays. His thought of criticism of feudalism and monarchy, the idea of building a country by law and the view of actively introducing western police system, and the opinion of changing criminal prison for the good, etc. were not only bright highlights in the political reform in the late Qing, but also played an inestimable role in promoting the modernization of China's legal system.The formation of legal thought of Huang Zunxian had a close relationship with the time and his personal experiences. On the one hand, he was well contemplating and had a clear understanding on the troubled situation in the late Qing; on the other hand, the long-term aboard experience as a diplomatic envoy helped him understand profoundly the development of capitalist society in the foreign countries.Huang Zunxian's legal thought was comprehensive and can be summed up in four dimensions of advocations—Constitutional Monarchy;Building the country by law; Abolishing of extraterritoriality and making law according to people. Meanwhile, Huang was also the practitioner of the modern legal system. He introduced the Western Police System and established a new security system when he was in charge of Hunan Provincial Judge Office during his later years. He founded a newspaper named The Current Affairs to propagate his ideas of rectifying the criminal penalty of prison, abolishing the outmoded policies, practicing local self—government and dividing sub—officer power to people.The legal thought Huang Zunxian was the historical breakthrough of the rule by law theory in ancient China, and has already had a modern sense of the legal concepts and thinking which also has a practical significance on our system reform and realization of Scientific Concept of Development.