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8 Western Legal and Political Theories as Agents of Social Reform The Development of the Law and Political Science Departments (1920s–1930s) L ike education and psychology, law and politics were two potentially practical and socially oriented fields of learning. Precisely for these reasons, Cai Yuanpei had attempted to separate the field of law from the university in 1917 and was stopped by strong protests from the faculty. Unlike other applied subjects of learning, however, law and politics, because of their historical connection with government office, were regarded by Zhang Zhidong as of a higher level than practical education with a technological bent. And precisely because of the special historical connotation of law and politics, Cai Yuanpei related them more with government office in history than the actual laws and political practices from the Chinese past. Although he did not succeed in cutting the law program, Cai did succeed in reducing the connection between the study of law, politics, and government office. The curriculum of law and politics from 1912 to 1937 demonstrated a gradual progression from the training of lawyers and candidates in the civil service examinations to a focus on scholarship . The disciplines of law and political science therefore represented a disjuncture with the laws and political practices of the Chinese past. At their inception, the Law and Politics Departments attracted an inordinate number of students who hoped to use their knowledge in these disciplines to pass the new civil service examinations or to qualify for waiver of these examinations. Following the Japanese example, wherein after the Meiji restoration university graduates who majored in law were often enrolled in the state bureaucracy through a civil service examination, in China after 1912, the 159 republican government circulated the criteria for a senior civil service and a regular civil service examination and implemented these criteria in June 1916. The senior civil service examination consisted of a preliminary and a formal stage, whose contents comprised law and economics: constitutional law, criminal law, civil law, administrative law, international public law, and economics. In addition to these subjects, the candidate had to choose one of the following: finance, commercial law, criminal prosecution law, civil prosecution law, or international private law. Graduates from the preparatory schools affiliated with universities would have their preliminary examinations waived, and university graduates would have the whole examination waived. The regular civil service examination was based on the high school curriculum, and the senior civil service examination on the university curriculum.1 Most of the students who enrolled at the university went into the Division of Law and Politics (which consisted of three departments: Law, Political Science, and Economics). Even before the civil service examinations were held, many students who were enrolled in the Division of Law and Politics hoped to find a job in the state bureaucracy after graduation. They often tried to achieve this by cultivating connections with one another, with members of the state bureaucracy, and with the instructors, who were usually government officials or lawyers. Before 1917, in the Subdivision of Law in the Division of Law and Politics , many instructors, while teaching at Peking University, concurrently assumed senior positions in the republican law courts, including serving as assistants and translators for Japanese lawyers who helped the Qing government draft its Chinese criminal and civil laws. Among them was Zhang Xiaoyi. At that time, Japan served as the center of education for much of the law faculty, but after Cai Yuanpei became chancellor that year, he appointed many instructors to the law faculty who had been educated in Europe. To sever the connection between government office and scholarship, Cai ruled that faculty members who concurrently held jobs outside the university could not be appointed as professors, only as lecturers. According to this new regulation, even well-known lawyers such as Wang Chonghui could only be hired as lecturers . In his speeches, Cai encouraged the students to focus on scholarship and not use university education as ladder to office and wealth. 2 In the 1912 political science curriculum, law figured prominently because of its role in the future civil service examinations. Of the twenty-seven courses, ten were on law: constitutional law, administrative law, the science of constitutional law, international public law, criminal law, civil law, commercial law, legal theories, specific studies in international public law, and international private law. Courses on political science numbered fourteen, of which six were on various government policies. The remaining eight courses, less than a third of the curriculum, dealt...

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