Towards a Knowledge History of Chinese Law: An Introduction to the History of Chinese Administrative Law Science, Its Pioneering Actors, and Knowledge of Normativity

Abstract Within Chinese legal studies, the construction of a distinctly Chinese knowledge system emphasising “Chinese subjective consciousness” (中国主体意识) has become a new important agenda. This introductory article responds to this methodological turn and growing interest in a broader intellectual history of Chinese law. Until recently, traditional Western scholarship on Chinese legal history has largely focused on written legal documents, not on their underlying processes of knowledge production. While Chinese scholars acknowledge the significance of (cultural) translation of foreign legal knowledge, the entanglements of Chinese and Western legal genealogies within a knowledge-historical framework remains underexplored. This article introduces a knowledge-historical approach to study Chinese legal history by narrating the history of administrative law through the lens of local knowledge production through cultural translation. It reveals compelling stories of local actors, who engaged with new knowledge of administrative law in multiple processes and layers of knowledge production from the late Qing dynasty to the late 1980s.