Bureaucracy and Judicial Truth in Qing Dynasty Homicide Cases

This article demonstrates how the specificity of statutes in the Qing Code combined with the bureaucratic process of case investigation, reporting, and review by superior courts to determine what could, and what could not, be accepted as valid “judicial truth” in serious cases such as homicide. Through a detailed examination of two homicide cases, both drawn from the mid-Qianlong era, the article shows how the complexity of actual circumstances could be forced into pre-existing legal categories and statutes. In both cases, the ideological intent of codified statute was thus cut short by the bureaucratic implementation of such law

Bureaucracy · Homicide · Ideology · Jurisprudence · Penal code · Statute · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Legal Studies and Society