Post by J. Bourgon on 2021-04-23 04:41:46
 Guo Weiting, Aix-Marseille University, Institut de recherches asiatiques (Irasia), postdoctoral fellow.

Guo Weiting is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar at Aix-Marseille University. He earned his Ph.D. in 2016 from the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. He is a social and cultural historian of modern China and Taiwan, with a specialization in law, empire, violence, identity, everyday life, and trans-pacific Cold War. He was a Limited-Term Assistant Professor and Director of the Taiwan Studies Group at Simon Fraser University (2015–2019), and Lecturer at the University of British Columbia (2013), and the recipient of Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2008–2011), Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation (2013–2014), and the Center for Chinese Studies in Taiwan (2018–2019). He has published peer-reviewed articles and has co-edited volumes forthcoming: Routledge Companion to Chinese Legal History (Routledge) and Trans-Pacific Fermentations: Taiwan and the Making of America’s Cold War Sinology (Academia Sinica). He is working on his monograph, Justice for the Empire: Summary Execution and Legal Culture in Qing China.. He is the Secretary of the International Society for Chinese Law and History (ISCLH).

"Summary Execution and Legal Culture in Qing China",

Until the late eighteenth century, the Chinese codified law and the capital case review system was one of the most stable, and perhaps most sophisticated, criminal systems in the world. The highly developed codification and the multiple levels of judicial review before the final execution of offenders had stunned several European observers. Yet, primarily since the height of the Qing Empire (1636–1912) in the eighteenth century, China embarked on an ambitious program to sweep away criminals by heavily legalizing the practice of summary execution. Facing the growth of unruly subjects, disbanded mercenaries, and wandering exiles and soldiers, the Qing rulers invested heavily in the operation of expedient death penalties. Focusing on how summary execution was enforced, challenged and manipulated, this talk analyzes the dialectical process of legal formation of empire and the symbiotic relationship between empire building and judicial expediency.

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