The Standard of Proof and Political Legitimacy : Criminal Justice in 18th Century China

In eighteenth-century criminal justice in China, official-judges enforced a highly demanding standard of proof sufficiency in fact-finding. Seen against the contemporary practices in Western Europe, e.g., the declining legal proof and its substitute intimate conviction in France, or the standard of beyond reasonable doubt in late eighteenth century England, the requirement in China was an absurdly stronger commitment, particularly in the part of the coherence of all evidence.

The presentation provides an empirical account of the legal practice in late imperial China, rapidly reviews the key differences between China and the West in the criteria used to verify the facts in the administration of criminal justice, and offers a political explanation from a comparative perspective.