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Yonglin JIANG, The Mandate of Heaven and the Great Ming Code. Asian
Law Series 21. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2011.
xiv + 250 pp. ISBN: 978-0-295-99065-1 (hbk.). $65.00.
The Great Ming Code (GMC) was promulgated first by the end of 1367
and finalized in 1397, and constituted one of the most important legal
documents in Chinese history. This code had received a considerable
amount of attention from the founder of the Ming Empire (1368-1644),
Zhu Yuanzhang or the Hongwu Emperor (r. 1368-1398), and many of his
ruling elites in the early Ming court. In general, the GMC not only set
forth the value system and social norms of Ming China, but also had a
profound impact on the legal cultures of the Manchu Qing Dynasty
(1644-1912) and China’s neighboring countries, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Instead of regarding the nature of the GMC as serving the ends of
social control and as a secular instrument for exercising naked power, the
author traces the cosmological foundation of the code, delves into the
religiosity of Chinese imperial law, and contends that ‘law in pre-Republic
China was not secular; rather, it represented a powerful religious worldview’ (180).
To the author, the GMC epitomized how Chinese imperial law had
been utilized as a cosmological instrument for carrying out the Mandate of
Heaven and also played the similar role of ‘spiritual textbooks to deliver
the human race from evil’. Accordingly, this book aims at elaborating how
the GMC could be arguably deemed as ‘a religious mission’, providing a
systematic analysis from the angle of legal cosmology, and aiming at elaborating why and how the code played such a religious mission.
In the introduction, the author proposes a vivid restatement of received
wisdom about the topic of ‘religion and Chinese legal cosmology’. For
many interested readers who are interested in the nature of Chinese codes
and legal culture, be they specialists or non-specialists, this introduction
should be a very useful guide. At least from the eighteenth century on,
many comments about the role and nature of the law in imperial China by
scholars from Western perspectives like Charles Montesquieu, Georg
Hegel, and Max Weber, asserted that China lacked an independent and
rational legal system. John K. Fairbank and Joseph Needham even attributed the failure of both developing capitalism and promoting new science
to the dearth of ‘the notion of genuinely universal law’ (5). Along the same
lines and based on the comparison with Western legal culture, Roberto
Unger has highlighted that Chinese law is not only subordinate to political
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012
DOI: 10.1163/156852012X628572
Book Reviews / JESHO 55 (2012) 183-213
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authority in the absence of the separation of powers and the existence of an
independent legal profession, but is also less developed for not having differentiated into fields such as constitutional, criminal, and civil law. At the
same time, Chinese codes failed to develop a Western-style legal order
because the Chinese did not conceive of a ‘higher’ universal or divine law
‘as a standard by which to justify and to criticize the positive law of the
state’ (8). Therefore, Chinese imperial law could be characterized by its
very secular nature.
Surprisingly enough to the author, almost all of the characteristics noted
by Western scholars are shared by most of their post-Cultural Revolution
counterparts in mainland China, who try either to justify the Chinese
revolution or to promote modernity. This book opposes the assessments of
the secular nature of Chinese legal culture. Following William Alford’s
critique of Unger’s assertion regarding Chinese imperial law that ‘his focus
is far more concerned with why China did not follow Europe’s course than
with the course it actually did follow’ (7), Jiang argues that the religiosity
of Chinese legal culture did exist if we may loosen the working definition
about how religion affects law from the standard point of espousing a transcendent God to the separation of the sacred from the profane.
By delving into the statutes of GMC, its many pertinent commentaries,
some famous cases in early Ming court, and the discourses claimed by Zhu
Yuanzhang and his ruling elites in the early Ming court, chapter 2 reconstructs the official legal cosmology. Based on the understanding of the
career and statecraft of Zhu Yuanzhang previously studied by scholars like
Edward Farmer, Romeyn Taylor, and John Dardess, Jiang portrays the
mentality of Zhu Yuanzhang and his court elites while painting in broad
strokes the GMC and the so-called Mandate theory in the process.
Zhu accepted the Mandate theory partly via the teachings from his contemporary Neo-Confucian advisors, and partly due to his many emotional
experiences while struggling with all his competitors and becoming the
founder of the Ming. Zhu considered himself to be the Son of Heaven,
and hence could proclaim his ability ‘to pacify the social order and spirit
world with the Lord on High’s blessing’ (25). The concept of sagehood
constituted an essential component of the Mandate theory, which facilitating Zhu to assure that he was a sage-ruler who had appeared to restore
China. A sage-ruler was believed to have been endowed by Heaven with
the responsibility to nourish the people, not only with material benefits
but also with spiritual purification; therefore, pursuing both material benefits and spiritual purification for all the people constituted the sage-ruler’s
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dual mission. In essence, Heaven created sage-rulers who were authorized
by the Mandate of Heaven and law was considered a key instrument in
manifesting the Mandate of Heaven and completing the ruler’s doublefacet mission.
Chapter 2 persuasively illustrates how the early Ming ruling elite viewed
law as a concrete embodiment of the cosmic order, basing the GMC on
what they understood as heavenly principle and human sentiment. Violating the law was deemed a ‘transgression against principle (li)’, and ‘law
codes were considered moral textbooks with the dual function of education and transformation’ (17). The early Ming ruling elite was not simply
paying lip service to the theory of the Mandate of Heaven; instead, “compiling law codes that followed the Mandate of Heaven” was vital for Zhu
and his court elites and their claim to represent the legitimate power for
“mediating between the spirit world and human society” and the law codes
were “designed to transform people’s spiritual world, as well as to control
their behavior” (67-68). Indeed, the Mandate theory underlined the cosmological foundation of law, the nature of crime, and the function of the
law which all epitomized in the GMC.
Chapters 3 through 5 demonstrate how the GMC replicates the cosmic
order; they include an analysis of the three major cosmic elements: the
world of spirits, the realm of human beings, and officialdom. Chapter 3
deals with the first cosmic element or the world of spirits. The GMC
adopted a differential treatment to regulate three categories of belief systems and ritual behavior: promoting official rituals dealing with Heaven,
Earth, soil and grain, mountains, rivers, wind, clouds, thunder, or rain;
controlling popular religious rituals, including those of Buddhism and
Daoism; and prohibiting ‘heretical religious rituals’. The code treats these
rituals with different measures, which revealed that “the law code was
designed not only to control people’s behavior in performing forbidden
rituals, but also to defend the official rituals and to ‘purify’ people’s intellectual world with the official worldview” (99).
Chapter 4 deals with the second cosmic element of the human realm.
The author borrows parts of the concept of ‘social pollution’ raised by
Mary Douglas (1966)1 in order to explain the ways in which the early
Ming ruling elite drew two boundaries to structure the human realm: the
internal boundary between Han and non-Han peoples within the Ming
1)
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966.
Book Reviews / JESHO 55 (2012) 183-213
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Empire, and the external borderline between the Ming and foreign countries. These two lines marked three cosmological regions: cultural China
(Zhongguo, or the ‘Central Kingdom’), geographical China or the Ming,
and foreign lands. Each region was assigned a different mission by the
Ming ruling elite. ‘Cultural China’, as the cultural and political core of the
empire, was assigned with the mission of purifying Chinese culture. In
the Ming Empire, which included ‘inner barbarians’, the customs of nonHan peoples had to be transformed to conform with Han values, though
non-Han people were allowed to keep a significant degree of cultural and
political autonomy. In the third region of the foreign countries, the crucial
mission was to safeguard the borders and protect Chinese civilization from
pollution or even destruction by alien forces. The author contends that the
GMC was ‘envisioned as an essential instrument for furthering imperial
policies on these boundaries’ (112).
The author analyzes some articles of the GMC, especially those pertinent to the regulations about both ethnic intermarriage and levirate marriages, which were mainly inherited from the Mongols, who had governed
the Chinese for almost a century just before the founding of the Ming
Empire, in order to prove that the code contained marriage and other
related purification programs. By establishing interracial unions and
enforcing Chinese cultural values, the code was designed to erase Mongol
‘pollution’ and all existing ethnic differences ‘with the ambition to make
the Mongols become Chinese, thus enlarging the Chinese domain’ (126).
In sum, the GMC played a significant role in creating and maintaining
the dual boundaries of the Ming. It protected the outer boundaries and
prevented danger along the borderlands by means of ‘controlling the flow
of personnel, goods, and information through land and sea frontiers’ (140).
As for the inner boundaries, the code imposed Chinese values and practices on ethnic minorities ‘by subjecting their mutual offences to Han Chinese legal institutions and enforcing interracial marriages.’ (140). The early
Ming elite expected to eliminate sources of ‘barbarian cultural pollution’,
erase the ‘barbarian’ ethnic identity, and thus enhance the influence of
‘cultural China’. These regulations may resonate with two kinds of ‘social
pollution’ pointed out by Mary Douglas: ‘danger pressing on external
boundaries’ and ‘danger in the margins of the lines’. Jiang concludes that
‘by distinguishing themselves from alien peoples, the Ming shaped a world
order in their own terms’ (141).
Chapter 5 deals with stipulations in the GMC designed to amend the
behavior of officials. Zhu Yuanzhang argued that ‘officials did not receive
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their posts from Heaven, but from the ruler who represented Heaven in
order to govern the realm’ (19). Accordingly, the author describes the Ming
ruling elite’s shared belief, which contained a political metaphor forged by
the many parts of human body:
The ruler was the head ( yuanshou); his officials were the legs and arms (gonggu); his
surveillance and transmission officials were respectively his ears and eyes (ermu) and
throats and tongues (houshe), corresponding to the law-enforcing stars (zhifa) in
Heaven; and his guards and soldiers were his talons, teeth, armpits, and elbows (zhaoya
and yezhou). Together, these parts shared one heart and constituted a single governmental body; and together, they served as a cosmic unit mediating between the spiritual and human realms (174).
The regulations governing officials in the GMC were essentially meant to
restrain the ruler. But behind these regulations were the self-evident creed
that a good official ought to ‘first, repay the ruler who granted him authority and wealth; second, . . . repay any local deities who have bestowed superhuman blessings; third, . . . repay the parents who gave him life; and his
final task is to repay the common people, who support him with food and
clothing’ (19).
In the conclusion of the book (chapter 6), the author tries to prove that
Chinese imperial law was profoundly interrelated with religion on both
the philosophical and practical level: ‘It not only served as a punitive tool
for social control, but, more importantly, was envisioned as a schema to
carry out the Mandate of Heaven and transform human beings’ (180).
This statement suffices to explain not only the cosmological foundation of
the GMC, but also the religiosity of Chinese imperial law.
By and large, this book is rather provocative. The author eloquently
challenges the extant mainstream ideas about the alleged ‘secular’ and ‘suppressive’ nature of Chinese legal culture, and copes with the crux of legal
cosmology in Chinese own terms such like the Mandate of Heaven.
Although the author seems to lean towards more discursive analysis of the
GMC, and thus scarcely focuses his analysis of the code in action, this
book has still arguably extended the scope and depth of the study of Chinese legal history. Overall, however, this book may shed light and serve as
a corrective for the received wisdom about the correlation between law and
religion in Chinese imperial law.
Pengsheng Chiu, Academia Sinica
Email: [email protected]