11 - Legal Understandings of Sexual and Domestic Violence in Late Imperial China

Summary

In Late Imperial China sexual and domestic violence were understood in terms of the Confucian kinship system. Legally defined social status keyed to class structure (‘free commoner’ vs. ‘mean/debased’) had played a complementary role for much of the imperial era. But in the Qing dynasty it yielded to the primacy of gender roles defined in terms of normative kinship hierarchy – a shift from status performance to gender performance. The chief priority of Qing law was to ensure that males played their proper role as husbands and fathers, and that females played their proper role as wives and mothers. A related priority was to defend chaste wives and daughters, as well as vulnerable young sons, against the predatory threat of the single, rogue male (‘bare stick’) who was left outside the family order altogether. This shift in the law reflected not only underlying change in imperial ideology but also the long-term transformation of social structure and the mounting social crisis in China.