Complaining in historical Chinese criminal trials

Abstract This study examines late-imperial Chinese criminal trials, starting from the observation that, in historical Chinese criminal trials, the speech act Complain is not only surprisingly frequent but is also often realised by the magistrate conducting the trial. We examine Complains in a corpus drawn from late imperial Chinese gong’an 公案 (literally, ‘criminal case’) novels. Whilst fictive in nature, such novels feature courtroom interactions in a turn-to-turn fashion, imitating spoken language. Gong’an novels are perhaps the best available sources for pragmatic analysis, since in historical China criminal trials were not transcribed. We examined our data through the lens of ritual, a finite typology of speech acts, and an interactional system. Our analysis shows that Complains represent an important part of historical Chinese courtroom investigations because they allowed magistrates to win over the trial’s audience and also to justify their judgments morally.