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Intro -- Preface to the New Edition -- Confessions on the Last Day of theTwentieth Century (Preface) -- Contents -- Introduction: Research on China'sJustice at the Basic Level -- Part I Judicial System -- 1 Why Send Law to the Countryside? -- 1.1 Question and Materials -- 1.2 Why Send Law to the Countryside? -- 1.3 Operation and Space of Power -- 1.4 Going to the Countryside-the Reconstruction of the Relationship of Local Dominant Power -- 1.5 Village Cadres-Carriers of Local Knowledge -- 1.6 Another Possibility of Knowledge and Another Role of the Village Cadres -- 1.7 Conclusion -- 2 Court Trial and Its Administration -- 2.1 The Definition of Problem -- 2.2 Two Institutions and the Structure of Courts -- 2.3 Administrative Judicial Institution in the Judicial Process -- 2.4 Collective Decisions of Administration -- 2.5 The Final Review -- 3 The Judicial Committee System in Basic-level Courts -- 3.1 The Definition of a Problem -- 3.2 Approaches, Methods, and Materials -- 3.3 Composition and Operation of Judicial Committees -- 3.4 Views and Reasoning of Judges -- 3.5 Are the Reasons of Judges Trustworthy? -- 3.6 Observation from Another Perspective -- 3.7 The Problem with Judicial Committees -- 3.8 Analysis of Two Examples -- 3.9 Conclusion -- Part II Judicial Knowledge and Technology -- 4 Courts of First Instance and Appellate Court -- 4.1 Judicial Knowledge as a Kind of Local Knowledge -- 4.2 Outline of Judicial Knowledge Genealogy -- 4.3 China's Basic-level Courts as Courts of First Instance -- 4.4 The Basic-level Courts as China's Courts of First Instance -- 4.5 The Ending as a Beginning -- 5 Dispute Settlement and Governance of Rules -- 5.1 Pose a Question -- 5.2 Two "Cases" -- 5.3 The Difference in Concern -- 5.4 Why Care About Dispute Settlement? -- 5.5 Rules Behind Particularism -- 5.6 Modernization and Rules -- 6 Inbetween Facts and Laws.

Professor Suli delivered the Fifth Annual Herbert L. Bernstein Memorial Lecture in Comparative Law in 2006 and this article is based on his remarks, with a foreword by Jonathan Ocko. The article is included in the inaugural volume of CICLOPs thatcollects the first six Bernstein lectures. In responding to Sending Law to the Countryside, Professor Frank Upham levied a number of criticisms against Professor Zhu Suli's book. Of particular importance was Upham's criticism concerning a lack of attention to the role of politics and political power in the Chinese legal system. Suli finds this criticism to be extremely important because it reflects what Suli believes to be an inherent bias against and misunderstanding of the Chinese legal system and legal culture by Western comparative legal theorists. Suli asserts that this criticism is misguided because it overlooks the vast differences between legal thought in the vein of Western ideology versus the Chinese strain of legal thought. Arguing that Upham approaches Chinese law from a bias created by an inherently Western ideology concerning law, Suli argues that the culture and governmental framework of China blurs the traditional Western lines drawn between law and politics. By illustrating the weakness of Upham's criticism through showing the particular methods that the Chinese legal system uses to achieve the goal of social order, Suli demonstrates the need for caution when engaging in comparative legal scholarship across two vastly different cultural and legal systems.

How was the vast ancient Chinese empire brought together and effectively ruled? What are the historical origins of the resilience of contemporary China's political system? In The Constitution of Ancient China, Su Li, China's most influential legal theorist, examines the ways in which a series of fundamental institutions, rather than a supreme legal code upholding the laws of the land, evolved and coalesced into an effective constitution.0Arguing that a constitution is an institutional response to a set of issues particular to a specific society, Su Li demonstrates how China unified a vast territory, diverse cultures, and elites from different backgrounds into a whole. He delves into such areas as uniform weights and measurements, the standardization of Chinese characters, and the building of the Great Wall. The book includes commentaries by four leading Chinese scholars in law, philosophy, and intellectual history--Wang Hui, Liu Han, Wu Fei, and Zhao Xiaoli-who share Su Li's ambition to explain the resilience of ancient China's political system but who contend that he overstates functionalist dimensions while downplaying the symbolic. Exploring why China has endured as one political entity for over two thousand years, The Constitution of Ancient China will be essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the institutional legacy of the Chinese empire