In "cult" Case In The Middle Of The Qing Dynasty On The Punishment

the crime of cult is a long-term important social problem in Chinese ancient society, and it was always punished severely by the rulers. As the integration of legislation in ancient China, Qing’s provisions of punishing the crime of cult stand for the highest legislation standard in the field, but at the same time, Qing is also the period when the crime of cult took place most frequently. Why is that? Is it caused by the deficiency of the law itself, or the problems of judicial practice? This arose my great interest. Aiming at the puzzle and applying comprehensively many kinds of research methods such as empirical analysis, comparative study, legal sociology and so on, the author studied legislation achievement and judicial cases from Yongzheng seven years and Daoguang twenty years, especially observed the law actual operation in judicial practice in the hope of resolving the above puzzle and providing experience and lessons for the current anti-cult struggle.The thesis can be divided into five parts:the first chapter mainly stated the concept and feature of "cult"and "the crime of cult", pointed out it had double nature of religion and politics in essence and classified it according to different criterion.The second chapter simply summarized Qing’s legislation of punishing the crime of cult. It not only introduced the original articles such as "to advocate the cult ","to pass and learn the cult" and so on, and but also analyzed the traditional articles like "Shi Wu Xie Shu" and "Yao Shu Yao Yan".The third chapter, according to the social harmful consequences of the crime of cult, it can be divided into three categories,"conspiratory" type,"common" type and "gentle" type. Combining the respective cases, the part mainly studied the actual legal operation conducted by various levels of officials when they addressed different kinds of issues and concluded the main factors which affected the conviction and criminal punishment.The fourth chapter is the analysis of the effect of Qing’s punishing the crime of cult. Combined with a large amount of judicial cases, the author found Qing’s cult after punishments will experience the following three situation, first, fighting against the oppression, second, changing the name of the religion or combining with the other religion in order to lessen the attention from the government, third, changing the nature, degrading into secret society or superstitious sects and secret societies, so as to separate itself from the scope of cult and staying away from the fate of hit.The fifth chapter summarized the feature of Qing’s punishment of the crime of cult in legislation and jurisdiction and the relevant experience and lessons, and pointed out the inspiration it gives to the current Anti-cult struggle.Although its large improvement in Qing’s legislation on punishing the crime of cult, the indistinction of concepts in legislation and this leaded to lack of the universal standard of the crime of cult in practice, and all of this leaded to the enlargement of scope of fighting against crime in practice. What’s more, in judicial practice, the emperor’s subjective will override the objective law, which played a decisive role in conviction and giving punishments. Influenced by this, all levels of officials often used the law flexibly so as to achieve the most favorable purpose. It is because of inborn deficiency in legislation and suppression from rule of man to rule of law that the legislation purpose of Qing’s punishing the crime of cult didn’t match with the actual judicial operation function and Qing became one dynasty most severely suffered from the problem of cult in history.