Traditional Chinese Legal Tradition

Chinese law is one of the oldest legal traditions in the world, emerging from the intellectual ferment of the Warring States period, when two rival schools, Confucianism and Legalism, competed to define the proper role of law in governance. Confucianism held that law should be a subsidiary tool used mainly against wrongdoers immune to moral instruction, while Legalism advocated codified law and harsh punishment to achieve social order. These strands were fused in the Tang Code of 624 CE and carried forward into the later Great Qing Legal Code. Older Western scholarship, following Max Weber, dismissed the tradition's sophistication, a view modern scholarship has extensively criticized.

Chinese law is one of the oldest legal traditions in the world. The core of modern Chinese law is based on Germanic-style civil law, socialist law, and traditional Chinese approaches. For most of the history of China its legal system was based on the Confucian philosophy of social control through moral education, together with the Legalist emphasis on codified law and criminal sanction. Following the Xinhai Revolution the Republic of China adopted a largely Western-style legal code in the civil law tradition, and the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949 brought a more Soviet-influenced system of socialist law, though earlier traditions from Chinese history have retained their influence. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/