The governments that ruled China from the 17^th to the 20^th century faced an essential problem of ruling a vast place that inhabited diverse people with a weak state capacity. Comparing to England, the Qing and Republican government collected one tenth of the revenue and employed only less than 2000 officials to rule China. Add to this conundrum, the Qing government increasingly developed a need to differentiate people through the deployment of ideas such as proto-ethnicity, gender, and locality. The republican government wanted to modernize China, aiming to balance the “old” Confucius tradition and the “new” western concepts. In the meantime, Local people also tried to grapple with these wrenching socio-economic changes on their own terms. This panel provides fresh insights to the historical literature by examining legal pluralism and distinct models of rule in the time of crisis, when ethnicity, gender, and ideology pulled the legal outcomes to different directions. The four papers explore legal institutions in practice and social changes in the making.

Yitong Qiu explores the Qing confiscation practice by examining 600 legal cases. She argues that the Qing government combined the confiscation traditions of central plain and that of the steppes, exercised pluralism in modes of punishments. Chenxi Luo examines the legal disputes of inheritance and familial care among banner people under the Qing Imperial Household Department during the late seventeenth century. She reveals that a gray zone exists on defining slaves within banner households. Sue Zhou explores the movement of Shenbing, also called the Sacred Army, which penetrated Southwest China in the early 20th century. Her study bears the implications of the Shenbing phenomenon onto the concurrent process of the communist revolution, demonstrating that the understanding of the Communist Revolution’s success has to be interpreted in the plural form — “successes” achieved in the different regional dynamics closely tied to each locale. Shumeng Han and Xiangyi Ren analyses the marginalization of mothers in property distribution during the Republican period and the unequal execution of legal reforms. The coexistence of new changes in law and pre-existing customs in legal practices marginalized mothers in property ownership.