Last spring, while wandering the stacks at Peking University’s law library, I stumbled across an unusual book on China’s property law. Authored by the famous law professor S. Francis Liu and two of his students, Boyer P.H. Chu and Lin-Chohg Chen, it was unlike any other law book I had seen from the period. There was no reference to its print run and publisher, an indication that it had not been formally published. Instead, on the inside was an inscription: Obtainable at S. Francis Liu Law Office, Yokohama Specie Bank Building 24, Bund Road, Shanghai.

Why would Liu and his colleagues spend their effort on an unofficially published legal book?

I found the answer in a small advertisement tucked into the Sept. 29, 1930, issue of Shanghai’s best-selling Shun Pao newspaper. The ad, after noting the “lack of translations of the Property Law to be inconvenient for scholars of Chinese law,” framed the book as a way to “aid Westerners’ understanding” of China’s legal system. Further research revealed it was part of a project pioneered by legal scholars like Liu during the 1920s and 1930s to translate and publicize the fundamentals of Chinese law into Western languages, a monumental effort that has since gone overlooked, if not entirely forgotten.

As the University of Toronto professor Li Chen points out in his book “Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes,” beginning in the 19th century, Western countries had used their monopoly on translation to create an image of Chinese law as “barbaric and backward,” which in turn justified their demands for extraterritorial rights. As China gradually modernized its institutions and economy, some Chinese realized that legal translation could also be used as a weapon to reshape the country’s image and fight back against colonialism in the field of law.

The center of this movement was the Law School of Soochow University in Shanghai. Home to both Liu and the renowned jurist John C.H. Wu, its School of Law was established in 1915 with the explicit goal of reforming Chinese law through the study of international examples. To this end, scholars there founded the quarterly English-language China Law Review in 1922. Later, in an effort to raise awareness of the Nationalist government’s legal reforms, the journal’s editors turned their attention to comparative law and began sending copies to law school libraries around the world.

In addition to the book on property law mentioned above, Liu and other scholars published numerous translations of new Chinese laws — including the Company Law, Maritime Law, Negotiable Instruments Law, Bankruptcy Law, and Civil Procedure Law — in The China Law Review, often shortly after their enactment. And in contrast to the official translations produced by government departments during the same period, The China Law Review translations included analysis and comments from the translators situating the laws in a global context.

In the foreword to Liu’s translation of China’s property law, his colleague, Wu, explains why this section of the Civil Code was chosen first: “The law of things is the kernel of the civil law in any legal system. It, more than any other branch of law, reflects the form of social economy, which in turn constitutes the foundation of the modern state.” In Wu’s view, the translation of the property law best demonstrated the strengths of China’s emerging legal system as well as its delicate balance of modern individualism and traditional collectivism.

As an example, Wu pointed readers to the concept of “dien.” Frequently translated as “mortgage,” the term carries a more nuanced meaning in Chinese. In particular, the dien-seller — typically a poor individual looking to mortgage land — is granted a relatively long period of time during which they can redeem their land. In other words, dien terms were generally friendlier to the poor, and as such, the practice was considered an embodiment of the traditional Confucian concept that people should “not worry about scarcity, but rather about unequal distribution.”

That belief helps explain why the Civil Code of the Republic of China deliberately retained dien, despite abolishing many other traditional legal concepts. Lawmakers argued the system not only considered the individual interests of both parties to the transaction, but also the community value of helping the poor. Liu and his two co-translators even included a special comparison between dien in China with antichrèse in France and Grundschuld in Germany as a way of highlighting the similarities between China’s Civil Code and the laws of other countries.

While affirming the merits of Chinese law, The China Law Review’s translators and commentators were not shy about making criticisms. In an article titled “Adultery as Crime in China,” published in 1935, Liu pointed out that, under the provisions pertaining to adultery in the Revised Criminal Code, “the citizenness of the Chinese Republic will enjoy absolute equality with her male compatriot, thus completing the metamorphosis of the traditional Chinese family, which has been based upon the male authority and the consequent female subjugation.”

On the other hand, however, Liu believed that some of the revisions, such as a provision criminalizing male adultery, making it punishable by up to a year in prison, reflected a belief in the law as an all-powerful tool for reform, rather than a reflection of societal consensus. Liu believed China could not achieve gender equality by passing laws; the country needed a concerted social campaign to eliminate inequality between the sexes. “If the change is universally agreed to as necessary and beneficial, it should at least be preceded by the process of gradual evolution through social education,” he wrote.

Liu and his fellow scholars were also aware that stereotypes regarding Chinese legal practice could not be broken overnight. In 1934, he wrote an article titled “Foreign Distrust of Chinese Judiciary,” stating: “It has now-a-days developed into an irresistible passion amongst foreign publicists in Shanghai to ridicule Chinese justice without reserve,” adding that “their attitude is impregnable and must have been deeply rooted in their mental make-up.” He believed that the most fundamental reason behind this phenomenon was that the understanding of Chinese law in the minds of Westerners was still clouded by images of Qing dynasty (1644–1911) courts created in the 19th century: “Most of them are still clinging to their mental picture of an old magistrate wearing a beard, sitting languidly on a chair and doling out justice in an arbitrary manner.”

Still, Liu placed his hopes on “light and truth” — the lux et veritas motto of his alma mater, Yale University. The only antidote to ignorance, in his mind, was honesty.

Translator: David Ball; editor: Cai Yineng.

(Header image: Visuals from VCG, Yale Divinity Library, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, and Wu Jingjian, edited by Ding Yining/Sixth Tone)