Law and Politics in Modern China: Under the Law, the Law, and Abo ...

Due to the continuity of Chinese literary language, Chinese law did not have to choose between natural and moral laws, between precise and vague rules, or between man and God. It harvested and assimilated all of the religious (ritual), legal, and moral connotations and reprocessed them into one diverse and flexible system through centuries of conceptual classification and juxtaposition. By the same token, Chinese law was and still is unable to make clear distinction between legal and moral rules and between law and politics. Until recently, Western scholars have been reading legal (fa) and moral (li) sides of Chinese law as if they were the same as the Western opposites of religious/secular and legal/moral laws. They overlooked the cultural significance of an ancient and continuous language that combines both legal and moral discourse and allows this discussion to continue as it intermingles. These deep linguistic roots are absent or shallow in the history of most modern European languages.⁵

Most European languages experienced linguistic change during the late medieval period. The ongoing linguistic accumulation of written Chinese made conceptual distinctions between legal, moral, and political rules fluid and elastic. In Christian Europe, these crucial distinctions that shaped the emergence of Western legal tradition were made possible by linguistic change from Latin to European vernaculars. After thousands of years of reclassifying and juxtaposing legal and extra-legal languages, and redefining its legal and moral order, the Chinese language was able to combine nature and human society into a seamless universal order. A similar universal order appeared in medieval Europe and was reconstructed in modern languages during the Enlightenment.⁶ The universal order in the Chinese language is a world of perpetual flux that is constantly flowing in and out of social order and disorder, within and outside of established legal rules.⁷ The foundation of conceptual barrier that underlies the distinction between law, on one hand, and moral and political rules, on the other hand, has been submerged by the natural growth and maturity of the Chinese language.

This fluid concept of order created by the Chinese language, with elastic meanings and multidimensional reasoning, is the main challenge