Socio-Legal Fictions In Qing China And Their Clash With British Colonial Law Presented by: Prof. Dr. Matsubara Date: 7 June 2024 Outline - - Introduction: Personal Starting Points • 1. Death and Property in Qing South China • 2. Household Division and Notions of Ownership • 3. Ancestral Property in British Hong Kong • 4. Comparative Law through Colonial History Conclusion Personal Starting Points - The Search for Classical Antiquity: 2,000-year Relationship between China and Japan, viewed from a semi-British-educated Japanese... - Tokyo Imperial University, c.1877 to present: Training the Human Resources for handling the Institutional Aspects of a Modern State - Relationship between the Formation of a State, Religious Beliefs/ Superstitions/Institutions, and the Protection of Property - How did the Chinese Empire, with its Minimal Bureaucracy, Non- existent Ability to Protect Property Rights, Sustain itself for Millennia? What Legal System Made that Possible? - All in the Context of Comparison, Primarily with Japan Death and Property in Qing South China - "Kill the Dead Ancestor": Land Reform in Guangdong - The Households as Principal Owners of Property - Function as Unit of Business Operation and Holding Unit of Agricultural Assets - The Idea of Zong as a Guiding Principle: The Metaphor of the Tree - The Family, Lineage and the Individual Household Division and Notions of Ownership - Household Property and its Intergenerational Transmission - Death is Nothing at All - Ideal of Continuity and Reality of Division - Household Division and Continuity of Property Holding - Rules of Division and their Practice - So, Who "Owns" it? Ancestral Property in British Hong Kong - The Creation of Ancestral Property: Posthumous Donation and Preservation in Division Process - The Individual Ancestor or Hall (堂 tang) conceptualized as owner - Ancestral Property and Structural Parallel with Trust - Treatment under British Colonial Law: The Rule Against Perpetuities - Charity and its "Public" Nature - Business Practices, Impersonal Shareholding, and Divergence Comparative Law through Colonial History - An Approach to the Legal History of Non-Western Societies: Colonial History as a Reconstruction of Encounters between the Indigenous Institutions and the Colonial Legal Mind - "Problematic" Institutions Placed in Reconstructed Contexts of Local Social Dynamics (e.g. One-Field Two-Owners, Understood in Context of Waves of Migration, Notions of Settlement, and State Formation) - Colonialism as a Typical (though not by any means exclusive) Process of Integrating a Society into a System of Transnational Norms - Different States were Integrated into this System at Different Times. The Nature of States Constantly Changed, the Nature of the Transnational System also Constantly Changed. - The Integration of What are now East Asian States took place at Different Points in the 19th to 20th centuries