On Yan Fu's Thought Of Legal Quality Of The National

Yan Fu, as a modern enlightening thinker, always put most profound concern on the citizen quality. The current academic research on his thoughts mainly focuses on the Three Principles of the People, i.e. people's intellect, people's ethics and people's strength, either by discoursing upon each principle separately or the three as a whole. Yan Fu's thought of citizen's legal quality, however, has not caught up wide attention from scholars, and the discussion on that still lacks monographs in academia. In this paper, a systematic study is given on Yan Fu's thought of citizen's legal quality; it is expected to enrich the academic research on his thoughts and deepen the understanding and comprehension on Yan Fu's ideological theory.The first part of the thesis, based on the theoretical foundation of modern citizen's legal quality put forward by Yan Fu, starts to investigate into the origins of this thought, that are modern western human rights theory and the three principles of the rule of law. The second part attempts to probe into the basic framework of Yan Fu's thought of modern citizen's legal quality by clarifying the key content of its elements, legal knowledge, legal awareness and legal belief and the correlation between the three. Then, Yan Fu's reflection and judge on the low legal quality of modern Chinese citizens, where he carries out insightful and incisive analysis of areas including traditional"subjects"awareness, the criminalization of laws, Obligation Standard, the cruelty of prison administration and the"proceeding-free"traditional legal culture, etc. is to be expounded in the third part. The fourth part induces and analyzes Yan Fu's methodologies and approaches to improve the legal quality of modern Chinese citizens, where he points out that only by establishing constitutional system, shall the transition from traditional"subjects"to modern"citizens"be realized; only by establishing a democratic proceeding system, shall the justice of laws be protected and guaranteed and citizens be pro-law and therefore their belief in the law be established. The fifth part explores how Yan Fu's thought of modern citizen's legal quality can inspire and be applied to the contemporary education on citizen's legal quality.