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his personal authority, even with a highly advertised divine code (of his own definition), could not control the minds and deeds of billions of souls who were left to make their own (“by-me”) laws. The anarchy, which he created to destroy his ideological and political opponents, eventually came to defeat him, as well as the system that he had spent his entire life to build. This is because no one, even Mao with all his power and charisma, could control the connotations, intended meanings, and implications of Mao's own words in a language that has been used and abused for more than five thousand years.
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The book demonstrates this line of argument through a historic narrative divided into six chapters, each of which represents a political era in Chinese modern history. The linear chronology is a deliberate attempt to establish Chinese legal background so that comparison can be made to the legal and political ideas of the West. This comparative footing makes it easier to show how and why foreign ideas of law and democracy often fail to take root in China. The idea of law without (or above) political interruption is simply inconceivable in the Chinese mind. After two thousand years of accumulation and cultivation, the codified language of law has become too vast and fluid to hold its original principles. It has become a slippery rhetoric used by legal practitioners, rather than a guideline defended by the judiciary.
Chapter 1: Imperial Law, Revolution, and Reform
This section begins with a brief history of Chinese imperial law, which describes how the political administrations of various dynasties have struggled to maintain political power by manipulating the inherited laws. It is not a conventional legal history that studies how rulings are created, accumulated, reclassified, and become an increasingly complex “legal” structure. It focuses instead on how law is made, remade, applied, and administrated, constantly motivated by state politics.