Social Power and Legal Culture: Litigation Masters in Late Imperial China (review)

Social Power and Legal Culture: Litigation Masters in Late Imperial China. By Melissa Macauley (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999) 416 pp. $55.00

Most aficionados of Chinese court dramas as enacted in theaters and films have probably come across the figure of the "litigation master"--plaint writer, strategist, and specialist well versed in the protocols and technicalities of the law in the late imperial period. Though the litigation masters were portrayed as shadowy and morally ambiguous characters, their interventions were often instrumental in deciding legal cases. In this fine volume, Macauley provides the first serious study in English of these fascinating, if slippery, figures, as she rescues them from the recesses, if not quite the dustbin, of history. Hers is not an easy task. It is not even a simple matter to find out who the real historical "litigation masters" were. As Macauley notes, imperial Chinese regimes since the twelfth century frowned upon these facilitators of litigation; the punishment was "military exile," as stipulated in a substatute of the Qing in 1764 (39). Although enforcement was selective, litigation masters were technically engaged in an illegal operation. To the imperial bureaucrats, "litigation master," or "litigation hooligan," was both a criminal category and a term of abuse. Most litigation masters undoubtedly tried to avoid the wrath of the officials while conducting their business. Only the activities of those whose ventures went awry are accessible in the historical records--as in the Qing (1644-1912) government archives on which Macauley mostly depends.

Macauley's objective, however, is not just to restore the litigation masters as historical figures. Indeed, given the limitations of the sources, detailed information on the litigation masters themselves in the book is somewhat uneven and spotty. Rather, Macauley uses the litigation master as a thread, at times a tenuous thread, to weave together several of her arguments about the "legal culture" of China. The narrative traverses the general and the particular--from ruminations about the deficiencies of Chinese local government and statecraft legalism to specific examinations of the litigation strategy that relied on dead bodies and of the socioeconomic features of the southeastern region. The result is an engagingly written monograph full of interesting insights. (The text could be shortened considerably, however; Macauley demonstrates a clear penchant for repetition.)

Macauley begins with the emergence of the litigation master in Chinese society, linking it to the burgeoning commercialization of the economy, an expanding population, and a chronically understaffed bureaucratic government. But at the heart of her argument is the notion that the legal arena was a site of counterhegemonic social contestation and that litigation served as a form of empowerment for the weak and the disadvantaged. The point is accentuated by her analyses of lawsuits in which women, particularly widows, managed to challenge, with the assistance of litigation masters, the established power of their male kin or the lineage.

Her discussion of the southeastern region, however, though well developed, is only marginally concerned with litigation masters. Instead, drawing on James C. Scott's idea of "state simplification," as elaborated in his Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, 1998), the discussion centers primarily on the failure of the Qing attempt to force an alien notion of "property" onto the local population in violation of customary practices and affinities. Macauley goes so far as to describe the Qing administration in the southeast as "colonial" in nature (278). Only after teasing us with continuing references to litigation masters in popular culture throughout the book does she turn fully to the litigation masters again in the last chapter by examining their multilayered portrayal in an opera and in a collection of stories.

The weaving together of its different parts may not be entirely smooth, but the book as a whole is a considerable achievement. It opens a window into the world of late imperial...