Late Qing And Early Republic Of China Family Law Analysis Of Hunan

During the transformation from the clan organization of the primitive society to the individual family, the concepts of family or saga are deeply rooted in everyone’s mind that family has become the most basic unit of people’s living. The establishment of the patriarchal feudal system in Western Zhou Dynasty has laid solid foundation for the creation of family concept linked by kinship. With the comprehensive establishment of the Confucianism in Han dynasty, the announced “family standard” by the Confucianism bas become the mainstream value concept in the family life. In order to standardize and manage the daily life of the family, the family method is gradually generated and improved.The Chinese family method is the outcome of the combination of etiquette and laws, which has plays a significant role on the historical development in thousands of years in China. With the crafty combination of ethics and law, it has become the important method to control the grass-roots society in China, which covers the shortage of the national law in the grass-roots society and even endows the head of the family with the power of penalty on minor criminal cases. The Chinese family method not only ensures the authority of traditional doctrine but also saves the judicial cost, which make the family method to wield important influence on the areas of economy, society and politics et al.The Hunan province in the late Qing and early Republic of China was during the climax of social unrest, when the western legal system concept was introduced, the reform and reformers like Tan Sitong were fighting for social change and civil rights, and the kuomintang and the communist party was announcing rural rights and peasant movements. With the establishment of the nationalist government, a series of civil law and criminal law was issued, which promoted the customs and traditions in the Hunan society. The family method of the legal system dualistic structure was stricken heavily that more and more “traitors” were generated continuously, which led to the unprecedented crisis in family method.However, the period of the late Qing and early Republic of China was not only a time of great changes but also of storms and stresses. Even though many advanced laws were issued, the ones which could be put into practice were rare, which provided certain existence room for family method. While succeeding the traditional function, it also tried to absorb the advanced legal system principle to realize the maintenance of parent privileges, status hierarchy, local government stability and other value orientations.This essay takes Hunan province with the sharp conflicts in politics and economy as the emphasis of family method investigation. Through the analysis of the main contents of Hunan family method in the late Qing and early Republic of China, it displays the living status of the grass-roots society in the turbulence of Hunan, investigates the time characteristics of family method at that time, and also applies rational criticism method on the family method to realize the apprehension distillation on the family method in the late Qing and early Republic of China.