Family Laws In The Ming And Qing Legal System

Mengzi has said: " the base of state is family", that is to say, in Chinese ancient society, the foundation of the nation and the basic cell of the social structure is all kinds of clans. The proper of a clan can directly influence the nation's administrative effect. What is a "clan"? "Clan" is a kind of social organization, in which, the same male ancestors' descendants, who live in a compact community for generations, take ties of blood as the link, geography as the base and property as the guarantee." It can also be called a "patriarchal clan". The self-sufficient small-scale peasant economy, which takes family as the productive subject, has promoted the form of clan, which has employed the blood tied as the link and burdened functions of propagating, producing, socialization. It's basic acting field of the public.Chinese ancient society possessed political system of highly concentration of authority. Pulsing obstacle of mountains and rivers, back of communication and traffic, the government had not so much cost and also couldn't make its power reach to the root class. Prefecture and county is the end the imperial power of authority could get to. The rural area could only give the power to the person trained in certain fields and the gentry to administrate. So, in order to protect the dynasty, the dominion had to protect its base-clan at first as well as get theirs' pledging loyalty. To respond to the regime, the national law also can't reach the rural area. So, "family and clan law" is the private law that the nation endowed the chief "quasi-legislation" and "quasi-jurisdiction", let the clan conduct limited self-administration and the chief intervene and control the members' life, as well as protected the clan's right.Though from the end of the Spring and Autumn Tunes, there was the enacting of the statute law, in fact, the root class could touch the national law little. They were scared of the national law and tried their best to escape from it. To the most, they could know a little from several famous cases. Mostly, the family and clan law was the criteria of conduct, which were the nearest distance and deepest permeating to the folk and the clan was the socialorganization that they could attach to.Ming & Qing dynasty was the time that the family and clan law was prosperous developing. During this time, the clan law's content and form was tendency to be mature and had get the official support and become the typical time. The paper takes the family and clan law of Ming & Qing dynasty as the object of study and has analyzed the basic content of the clan law, the interaction and conflict with the national law and the attitude of the nation to the family and clan law, from which, I get the conclusion: being one side of the binary-law of the feudal society, the national law and the family and clan law stabilized the feudal relationship from different points and protected the feudal order to jointly form the whole feudal law system.