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East Asia (2013) 30:121138
DOI 10.1007/s12140-013-9193-8
Shiping Hua
Received: 6 March 2013 /Accepted: 14 May 2013 /Published online: 12 July 2013 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
Abstract Shen Jiaben, the late Qing scholar-bureaucrat, was made into a hero by the times during the Xin Zheng period which was a reaction to the failed 103-Days Reform in 1898 characterized by utopianism. Shens experience within the bureaucracy and his pragmatic approach in reforms were needed by the Qing rulers at that time. Shen was gradually forgotten after the collapse of the Qing dynasty and the repeated failures of the Chinese attempts to achieve constitutionalism. He was re-discovered in the last two decades among mainland China scholars, because his piece by piece approach in reforming the legal system without grand theories happened to be in agreement with the atmosphere among Chinese scholars, who after the failure of the 1989 Tiananmen Event, had gradually developed a consensus to reform Chinas political system piece by piece, not through grand theories.
Keywords Late Qing legal reforms . Meiji constitution . Shen Jiaben . Law transplantation . Constitutional thought
A Chinese saying goes, Heroes are made by the times. () Shen Jiaben (18401913), the late Qing scholar/bureaucrat, was not posed to be a hero. At the time of the late Qing great upheavals starting with the 1840 Opium War, Shen spent most of his early years painstakingly trying to climb the social ladder within the political system: After becoming Ju Ren, the intermediate level scholarly title, he worked hard for 18 years before finally attaining Jin Shi, the highest scholarly title of Qing. During these long years, he did not read books of his interest, but improved his skills on the eight legged essays, the main requirement for the Qing civil service examinations. He worked for three decades at the Board of Punishment as a clerk before finally becoming a real bureaucrat, an outer official of Zhi Fu, or magistrate, in Tianjin. When many Chinese officials and scholars were attracted to the103-Day
S. Hua (*)
University of Louisville, Fourth Floor, Room 423, Guy Stevenson Hall, Louisville, KY 40292, USA e-mail: [email protected]
S. Hua
Xian International Studies University, Xian, China
Shen Jiaben and the Late Qing Legal Reform (19011911)
122 East Asia...