The Study Of Civil Affairs System Of Litigations Between Chinese And Foreign Citizens In The Late Qing Dynasty And Early Republic Of China

Chinese historians have given a verdict to China's social formation after 1840's First Opium War with a phase of a "semi-colonial and semi-feudal country", which differentiates itself either from countries of feudal autarchy or colonized countries which have been absolutely deprived of their sovereignty. For the reference as a "semi-colonial country", or in another word, a half-sovereignty-deprived country, the partial deprivation its judicial power, one of the most inherent parts of its sovereignty, is best annotated by Consular Jurisdiction and Mixed Courts established on the basis of all sorts of unequal treaties humiliating the whole nation as well as forfeiting its sovereignty. Hiding behind the aforesaid two nouns, a story is enriched manifesting two distinctively different legal cultures'collision against each other and consequently, the conflicts, resistance and merging and assimilation brought forth embodied in a mode of courts. By analyzing Judgment Records for Litigations between Chinese and Foreign Citizens, as well as by means of examining one copy upon another first-hand letters of court decrees, we could make the genuine and vividly-presented scenes of lawsuits engaged between Chinese and foreign citizens recur. For how the courts then dealt with civil and criminal disputes between Chinese and foreign citizens, how Consular Jurisdiction functioned in the aforesaid trial activities, how our country's judicial system operated at that time or how the law worked etc., we could, by analyzing the paper of civil judgments of Judgment Records for Litigations between Chinese and Foreign Citizens and by researching Sino-foreign related civil litigation systems, explicate the operation processes of judicial systems and laws then. Judgment Records for Litigations between Chinese and Foreign Citizens brings us back to the past times providing valuable first-hand documental materials for our understanding of the operation of the whole judicial systems in terms of Sino-foreign activities in Modern China. By means of utilizing these materials we can also obtain better comprehension of settlements of Sino-foreign litigant disputes which could thus provide a lot of rewarding experiences and enlightenment for our better handling of all kinds of legal disputes engaged between Chinese citizens or between foreign citizens in China.