Conclusion

The point of departure for understanding how sexual and domestic violence was understood in early modern China (at least, according to elite norms) was the normative hierarchy of the Confucian kinship system.

In closing, let us reflect again on the basic assumptions of rape law in Ming-Qing China.^[378] Many of those assumptions would have been perfectly familiar to jurists of earlier dynasties in China, and even to jurists from other legal traditions altogether. For example, Anglo-American common law traditionally defined rape as ‘unlawful sexual intercourse (requiring penetration) of a woman not the rapist's wife, by force and against her will'. It required that ‘actual force' or verbal threat thereof be present for a woman to prove that the act had been ‘against her will'; it required a woman to have ‘resisted to her utmost' in order to communicate her ‘non­consent' to the rapist, and held her ‘at fault if she did not manifest her non­consent with sufficient clarity'; in addition, ‘the fact that a victim was unchaste, was a prostitute, or had a prior consensual sexual relationship with her rapist was a defence to the crime of rape'.^[379] This Anglo-American reasoning would have made perfect sense to a Ming or Qing magistrate. Indeed, these basic elements of rape law are common enough that they may be considered definitive of women's status under traditional patriarchal legal systems, before modern reforms (in some countries, at least) redefined sexual assault as a violation of individual rights.

What was truly distinctive about the late imperial period is that both the ideal rape victim and the ideal rapist envisioned by jurists had shifted from a status-based stereotype keyed to the class structure, to a gender-based stereotype linked to normative family roles. The stereotypical rapist had always been envisioned as an outside male who threatened the integrity of patrilineal descent, but the specifics of his identity had changed. The old stereotype of a slave attacking his master's wife or daughter gave way to the predatory rogue male outside of the normative family system: the ‘bare stick'. The typical victims in Qing rape cases were not members of the elite, but rather chaste wives and daughters, or young boys, of humble, law­abiding peasant families. This shift in the law reflected not only underlying change in imperial ideology, but also the long-term transformation of Chinese social structure and the mounting social crisis of the High Qing.