博彩网址大全

       2015年1月1日在北美正式上线的《中国社会科学报》英文报(Chinese Social Science Today)，主要面向海外出版发行，立足中国人文社会科学领域，旨在向海外读者传递中国人文社会科学领域最新动态、最新观点以及最新研究成果。

 

 

     The Great Qing Legal Code, the legal code of the Qing Dynasty, was the first Chinese traditional legal work translated into English. Photo: FILE

 

     The Great Qing Legal Code, also known as the Penal Laws of China, was the legal code of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912). It was first translated into English by Sir George Thomas Staunton and published in London in 1810.This made it the first Chinese traditional legal work directly translated into English. However, compared with the influence that the code’s English version has exerted on European countries and America as well as on scholars from these regions, the attention that Chinese academia has paid to the translated version is incommensurate.

 

    In recent years, the English version has started to be increasingly valued in the Chinese fields of translation, legal history, and the history of China-Britain relations. In fact, the English translation of the Qing Code and the foreign communications that came with it can be regarded as a watershed moment, which represented the peak of the dissemination of Chinese culture to the West by missionaries since the Ming and Qing dynasties.

 

   In 1792, the British government sent the Macartney Mission to China. Staunton went with them as a cadet, together with his father, who had been appointed as the secretary of the mission.

 

   In 1800, the chairman of the East India Company in Canton (Guangzhou) hoped that the British could obtain a copy of the legal provisions of China. But the then Viceroy of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces only reluctantly extracted several parts of the code and printed 100 copies. Staunton was asked to translate these six statutes into English. Perhaps it was this task that aroused his interest in studying Chinese law and translating the Great Qing Legal Code.

 

   In 1832, a periodical called The Chinese Repository was founded in Canton by the first American Protestant missionary appointed to China. The periodical published the commentary on Staunton’s translation serialized in three issues from Volume II.

 

    Due to the large circulation and wide dissemination of the periodical, the English version of the Qing Code, once introduced and commented, attracted extensive attention in the Western world. In Staunton’s memoir, commentaries from Edinburgh Review, Eclectic Review and other newspapers and periodicals were included. Undoubtedly, these Western commentaries promoted the second wave of transmission of the English version of the Qing Code in the West, making it a first-hand reference material for Sinologists studying Chinese legal culture. In addition, the French, Italian and Spanish versions were also published as translations from the English version, reflecting the huge influence that the code’s translation had in the Western world at that time.

 

    The publishing of the English version of the Qing Code marked the beginning of European and American scholars’ hundred-year-long study on Chinese law. Before the Opium War, they mostly had a critical attitude toward the Qing Code. For example, The Chinese Repository had been keen to report a large number of homicides and capital punishment cases in China, which implied their distaste for such numerous, frequent public executions. According to the stipulation of the Qing Code, the judgment on homicide cases mainly depends on the rank and status of the prisoner. The inequality in Chinese legal culture (the ranks and privileges of bureaucrats, the seniority and inferiority of ordinary people) may be the most disagreeable feature to Westerners. This became the best excuse for them to criticize and satirize Chinese laws. After the Opium War, Western scholars gradually abandoned the one-sided criticism of the Qing Code and began to pay attention to the civil relations and principled systems in it. In the early 20th century, some scholars interpreted China’s legal system from a cultural perspective and used it to explain the rationales behind Chinese civilization.

 

    The European and American people’s evaluation of the Qing Code includes Western-centered ideology, ethnocentrism and other malicious criticisms. This came along with some objective judgement, but on the whole, it is difficult to cover up the utilitarian color and political aims behind European and American businessmen and missionaries’ safeguarding their interests in China. In 1833, Staunton, then a member of the British Parliament, proposed to set up courts in China to hear British cases with the excuse that Chinese laws were backward, which was passed by the British Parliament.

 

    The English translation of the Qing Code launched a dialogue in the history of legal cultural exchanges between China and foreign countries, which promoted the dissemination of Chinese legal thought. But it also marked a leak from China’s “precious legal archives.” The Qing Code was used by the British colonial aggressors to meddle in China’s judicial trials and interfere in China’s judicial system, which endangered the country’s national security.

 

      Hu Bo and Dong Xiaobo are from the School of Foreign Language at Nanjing Normal University.

 

 

 

来源：Chinese Social Science Today （中国社会科学报英文版）  时间：2018-12-06

 

作者：博彩网址大全-博彩网址 胡波 董晓波