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| Construction of Local Governance Order——From the Perspective of Interaction between State Law and Customary Law in the Ming and Qing Dynasties |
| Cui Jing |
| School of Government Administration， Central University of Finance and Economics， Beijing 100081 |
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Abstract How to achieve the unity of governance order between the state and local society is a growing topic. It is important for China in the traditional imperial era and after that. In the Ming and Qing Dynasties， state law and customary law had division and cooperation in the process of the construction of local social order. Firstly， customary law was formed on the basis of folk customs or habitus， adjusting the dispute of “minor details” in the daily life such as “household， marriage， farmland， money， debt” and so on. It had played a role of “moistening things silently” for the governance of local society. State law was formulated and promulgated by government agency， focusing on the “major events” of the political and economic matters of the state beyond the “minor details”. Secondly， state law and customary law collaborated and integrated with each other in local social governance. State law recognized and absorbed customary law in varying degrees；customary law was also actively calling for “being inducted” into state law. The key to the integration of state law with customary law is the unified “core values of supporting judicature” which run through both official and civil litigation. The integration and homoorganicity of “judicial core values” support the “equity” between “human relationship” and “law” examined by local officials and civil arbitrators and make the law intertwined with the religious belief and etiquette system in the local society. It promotes the unity of state and society in the governance order at the local level. This observation is very enlightening on how to mitigate and transform the contradiction between the unified system and effective governance through the new governance structure in the new period of China， reconstructing the local governance order combined with the traditional and modern， and realizing the super stable structure of the state governance with conceptual integration.
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Received: 21 May 2019
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2019, Vol. 58 
