Introduction: One Hundred Court Cases on Marriage

Abstract

Originally published for limited circulation in 1981, this collection of one hundred court cases on marriage, divorce, and family conflict was recommended to me by a senior Chinese legal scholar during a period of recovery and reinstitutionalization of the legal system in China. Emerging from the Cultural Revolution, party leaders, cadres, and legal professionals all seemed to have learned certain lessons from the "ten years of disaster," which has done great damage to the concept and rule of law (such as they were in post-1949 China). The post-Mao era, then, was a time of heightened awareness about the necessity and benfits of "rule of law" (fazhi) in contrast to "rule of men" (renzhi), through which China as a whole had just suffered. There was a growing consensus that a more objective, predictable system of laws ("equality before the law" was the catch phrase) was superior, and therefore preferable, to "rule of men." Many Chinese, especially those in relatively high positions in the party, bureaucracy, and intellectual community, had bitterly and painfully experienced the arbitrariness of the latter.