The CUHK LAW Greater China Legal History Seminar Series aims to serve as a forum to discuss the historical development of a great variety of legal issues of interest in the Greater China region. The next seminar, "Death Sentences in the Great Qing, 1744-1840", will be delivered online by Professor Moulin XIONG, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics on 6 October 2023.
About the seminar: Over the last centuries, the view on the death penalty in Qing China has been distorted, presenting a picture of abusive brutality and excessive cruelty, and thus was used as the critical pretext to establish immune extraterritorial jurisdictions. Nevertheless, the existing comments are more literary embellishments without empirical evidence, and few comparative and historical perspectives have been utilized to clarify the truth. In this study, we mined annual death sentence numerical data for the period 1744 to 1840 from official archives and literatures, deciphering the capital crimes in detail and ascertaining the longitudinal trend with population statistics. To reassess the profile of capital law and justice, we carefully reviewed the previous literatures and conducted a comparative analysis of key aspects in Qing China and in England and Wales.
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