Emperors issued amnesties to address extensive and excessive punishments, pardon convicted imperial relatives and confidants, and forgive participants in rebellion. Several emperors realized that the legal system victimized a large portion of the population, including good people. Instead of implementing thorough reforms to the legal system, the emperors generally relied on temporary amnesties as a solution to the widespread criminalization of commoners. While amnesties allowed the population to tolerate the legal system, they directly distorted the concept of justice. The emperor forgave criminals but did not forget their crimes. Officials who implemented the law were blamed for causing chaos and suffering, while the emperor presented himself as a savior. Men, upon being convicted, lost their independence, dignity, and autonomy before the law. However, after being pardoned, they owed their lives and deaths to the throne.

Chapters 3, 4 and 5 argue that the emergence of convict politics in the early Chinese empires was a direct result of the legal system producing a significant number of innocent convicts, thereby undermining the understanding of crime and criminality. Chapter 3 delves into the mutual-responsibility system – a major principle of legal practice from the Qin and Han dynasties through to the twentieth century. This system, aimed at deterring crime through the imposition of severe punishments to instill fear, inadvertently compromised justice. It led to openly punishing the lawful, including the families, neighbors, and friends of offenders. While effective in enforcing surveillance and procuring convict labor, the mutual-responsibility system underscored the absolute power of the throne, yet it distorted the relationship between crime and punishment and conflated moral standards. This systemic injustice sparked ongoing and fervent debates among scholars, officials, and even emperors. However, the bureaucratization of legal processes prevented any meaningful reform from happening.

Hu Jintao took over in 2002 and during his first term he sought to alleviate the rural plight bequeathed by his predecessors. His leadership cut taxes on agriculture and fees on rural education and health and rural economy began to turn around, as indicated by a pickup of rural income growth. In response to the 2008 financial crisis, the Hu Jintao leadership reprioritized policy back to the preexisting urban bias of the China Model. The stimulus program, commonly known as Siwanyi, funded infrastructural development, technology programs and urban real estate projects, leading to productivity decline and a massive debt accumulation, which Xi Jinping inherited in 2012. Xi made some adjustments and stepped up income transfers to rural households under his “Common Prosperity” program but his overall policy program and approach have been heavily statist and detrimental to growth. He downplayed economic growth as the objective function of the Communist Party of China and his crackdowns on private-sector businesses, escalation of geopolitical tensions, and draconian COVID controls weakened the confidence of investors and consumers alike. Chinese GDP is registering its lowest growth rate since 1978.

Although legal practices were sharply criticized and reforms were occasionally suggested, no significant changes were ever realized. Chapters 10 and 11 delve into the puzzle by examining the critics themselves. The majority of these critics were Confucians, who often attacked the law implementers – the technical bureaucrats – for lacking virtue and enforcing the law with brutality. Chapter 10 argues that the Confucians’ fierce attacks on technical bureaucrats were, in fact, a struggle against the bureaucratic hierarchy and its mechanism for producing political elites. Leading Confucians refused to serve as prudent, detail-oriented, and technique-focused bureaucrats. Nor were they willing to climb the ladder of success from the bottom of the bureaucracy. However, they faced a significant dilemma: those Confucians who aspired to act according to their ideals rather than submitting to institutional rules were rejected by officialdom. Yet, once Confucians successfully became officials, they were expected to obey the bureaucratic hierarchy and follow administrative regulations – ultimately becoming the very technical bureaucrats they had once criticized.

Scholars of Chinese history are well acquainted with the use of convict labor in constructing infrastructure, serving in armies, erecting monuments, and aiding in the establishment of settlements in newly acquired territories. This chapter explores the role of convict labor in local government. I argue that convict laborers were integrated as essential aides to officials. While they were exploited as both objects and instruments to sustain the political economy, convicts simultaneously occupied crucial roles in operating the governmental apparatus and administering the populace. The local administrative space functioned as an open prison. Despite the brutality inherent in the exploitation of convict labor, the unearthed administrative documents masked the grim reality, projecting a veneer of civilized order onto this group. Legal statutes and administrative records granted bureaucrats and scribe–functionaries the authority to control convicts; paradoxically, these same documents also subjected the bureaucrats and scribe–functionaries to scrutiny. Failure to meet expected job performance standards could result in criminalization, turning these officials into convicts themselves.

This book benefits from weaving together intellectual history and political and legal history, illuminating legal practices through the lens of philosophical ideas and re-examining philosophical ideals within the tapestry of historical experience. As the title From Utopia to Serfdom suggests, this approach uncovers profound paradoxes within the political and legal practices of early Chinese empires. Contemporaries keenly observed the hardships these legal practices imposed on the population and called for change. However, reforms either were never initiated or failed to fundamentally alter the core practices. The legal practices of early Chinese empires, which often distorted the concept of justice, were not arbitrarily devised to serve the absolute power of the throne, as some scholars have claimed. Rather, they were frequently grounded in a utopia complex and perfectionism in classical Chinese thought. A deeper exploration of these ideals, along with the evolving notions of justice and sovereignty, is essential to fully grasp their impact on Chinese history, particularly on its political and legal culture and practices.

Emperors generally did not worry that pardoning crimes and revoking associated punishments would constitute an injustice to victims or erode the legality of the law, as sovereignty was often understood not only in relation to the body politic but also through the framework of parenthood. When individuals of flesh and blood were translated into aggregations of nameless parts of a unity which was represented by the emperor, the suffering inflicted on the victims and the suffering inflicted on offenders by punishment were metaphysically equivalent – both were detrimental to the whole body. Whereas the emperor punished offenders primarily to maintain the order of the whole, he could also pardon offenders on behalf of his people – the parts of the whole – if it served the interests of his empire. Furthermore, Han emperors also claimed to be the mother and father of their subjects, whose compassion compelled them to grant imperial amnesties to all under Heaven. Therefore the justice that protected individual interests was required to be compromised with mercy and love. However, frequently pardoning culprits on a large scale directly paralyzed the justice system.

Rural income growth substantially slowed down in the 1990s, both relative to the growth rate in the 1980s and relative to contemporaneous GDP growth. This was the start of the phase of Chinese reform era in which the majority of the Chinese population gained a decreasing share of the GDP improvement. The pivotal moment was 1993–94, when China’s central bank recentralized finance and banned private finance. The Chinese state prioritized urban development at the expense of rural China. Rural enterprises began to falter owing to rising credit constraints. Capital constraints increased and labor adjusted in response and rural labor migration rose dramatically beginning in the mid-1990s, a development, while partially offsetting a broad rural plight, that was to leave a detrimental impact on rural human capital in the long run.

Chapter 2 describes convict politics at the central court. Former convicts were entrusted with power, serving as important officials or even chancellors. Approximately twenty percent of recorded high officials throughout the two centuries of the Western Han had once been condemned; some of them even received the death penalty but managed to reascend to the center of politics. At the same time, officials easily fell foul of the law and became convicts themselves. In a high-risk job, approximately forty percent of high officials, during their tenure, were accused of violating the law and received punishments ranging from hard labor to the death penalty. Severe tension emerged between the nature of the law and the status of convicts, between the lawful and the guilty, and between the philosophical elaboration on the treatment of criminals and the actual practice.

The traditional view that Chinese empires relied primarily on rituals and ceremonies while neglecting the role of law has been increasingly challenged. Archaeologically discovered sources show that sophisticated laws with meticulous procedures constituted the backbone of early Chinese empires. The Qin and Han dynasties were more “Legalist” than their counterpart in the West, the Roman Empire. This book revives the stories of the main operators within the imperial bureaucracy – technical bureaucrats (law implementers) and convict laborers – whose histories had been forgotten for nearly two millennia.Leveraging methodological innovations from the digital humanities, I have collected data on a large number of officials who were criminalized and later re-employed in officialdom. This discovery enables me to propose a new framework for examining Confucian criticism of law and legal practice in early China. The biographical database also transforms linear storytelling into multidimensional narratives and helps identify Confucian social networks otherwise hidden in current literature.

This chapter examines universal amnesty through a previously ignored lens of utopian discourse. Chinese scholars, particularly Confucians, articulated the ideal of a crime-free society as an intellectual foundation to support their teachings. However, their theoretical construct was appropriated by the Han emperors, who embraced this philosophical discourse as both an aspiration and a benchmark for their governance. Self-congratulatory emperors extolled their reigns as golden ages by granting amnesties, thereby temporarily transforming a tainted world plagued by wickedness into a realm devoid of criminals. Self-reflective emperors used frequent amnesties to acknowledge their inability to attain ultimate peace, promising a fresh start for their era as a way to secure their legitimacy. Contemporary scholars and officials recognized that frequent, widespread pardoning of criminals compromised the justice system. However, canceling crimes no longer merely aimed to pardon criminals but served as an instrumental strategy to re-establish a semblance of normality and thereby secure the legitimacy of the dynasty. To pursue a perfect society, Western Han politics became the enemy of good.

Early imperial officials, while enforcing the law, were paradoxically its victims too. They were keenly aware of the stark and ironic contrast between the theoretical design of the legal system and its practical enactment. The law’s meticulous statutes were designed to guide people on what to avoid, yet this led to an over-complication of the law such that commoners did not know what to avoid. The high performance mandated by the law to prevent negligence and laxity ironically ended up punishing those who were earnestly committed to their duties. The principle of assessing results according to predefined objectives was meant to hold officials accountable, but it ultimately stripped them of discretionary power and overlooked their intentions and efforts. Fearing the repercussions of absolute liability, officials might collectively resort to deceit. Furthermore, while severe punishments were intended to eliminate the need for future punishment and establish a crime-free utopia, they criminalized a vast swath of officials and commoners alike. Reforms aimed at simplifying the law were initiated by two different emperors, yet both seem to have failed.

China took off in the 1980s on the strength of its rural entrepreneurship, facilitated by financial liberalization. Politics was trending liberal, providing space and flexibilities for bottom-up reforms. China was still an autocracy but it was a frictional autocracy, an autocracy in which an autocrat faced obstacles in implementing his ideas. That changed dramatically after 1989. A new leadership team, the Shanghai technocrats, came into power and promptly reversed many political reforms instituted in the 1980s and recentralized China’s finance and taxation. A statist development model replaced the directionally liberal model of the 1980s. China ushered in an era of the China Model, which was rooted in urban bias and anchored on statist finance and autocracy.