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This volume explores a variety of issues surrounding questions of human rights and freedom in China.
The chapters in this volume suggest that one can speak of very significant realms of freedom, with or without the protection of law, in the personal, social, and economic lives of people in china before the twentieth century. This was recognized, and partly codified, in the early twentieth century, when legal experts sought to establish a republic of laws and limits. The process of legal reform however, would be placed firmly in the service of strengthening the post-imperial Chinese nation-state. The rule of the Guomindang and then the Communist Party would result in an ever-increasing level of state control, culminating after 1949 in a despotism that was felt more widely and deeply than any in Chinese history. Yet the last decades of the twentieth century and the first years of our own would witness a slow, steady, but unmistakable reassertion of realms of personal and communal autonomy, accompanied by experiments in electoral democracy on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, that show, even in an era of strong states, at least the prospect of institutionalized freedoms of a kind that J. H. Hexter, too, might have recognized and applauded.
