Over the last three decades a resurgence of interest in Chinese legal history and the opening of archives for the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) has contributed to an outpouring of scholarship on interpersonal violence, homicide and capital punishment in eighteenth-century China.

Marked by unprecedented demo­graphic growth, economic commercialisation and territorial expansion, the eighteenth century has long been considered a flourishing era in the Qing dynasty, but it also witnessed an upsurge in interpersonal violence that triggered a protracted and wide-ranging legislative crackdown on crime.

The Qing court faced a stark dilemma. Violent crime exposed fissures in the social and economic order that endangered bedrock principles of Chinese civilisation such as filial piety, patriarchal privilege, social hierarchy and female chastity. Characteristically, the rulers responded pragmatically with legislation that fine­tuned existing crimes and punishments, created new offences, restricted stat­utory pardons and expanded the use of the death penalty. In fact, this steady stream of legislation addressing crime and criminal justice was part of a broader ‘legislative turn' in Qing rule that was unmatched in any earlier dynasties. Still, no matter how impressive this legal tinkering may have been, the crackdown on crime was destined to fail because it did not adequately address the underlying economic and social milieu that impelled people to violence. A careful examination of homicide cases exposes the inequities of eighteenth-century economic and demographic change that undermined social and economic norms, vitiated conventional concepts of justice and disrupted the ideological consensus of Chinese civilisation.

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