Project Title: Legal Literacy and Imagined Law in Republican China

What happens when citizens’ legitimate expectations of the law get ahead of the ability of legal institutions to deliver on the promise of new legislation or legal innovations? This project uncovers vernacular conceptions of the law at a time of legal creativity and uncertainty in China. Over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, multiple states competed for the loyalty of ordinary people. Popular ideas about role of the law circulated across a fragmented political landscape. Republican China began in 1912 with a new constitution, new citizen rights, and new legal codes, but the country soon split under different regimes. The Guomindang heartland, warlord territories, former concessions, and the Soviets each promised inhabitants a measure of justice. Legal literacy meant navigating an uneven legal system. Exploring visions for the law exposes citizens’ frustrations, and may shed light on the eventual appeal of communism. Legal literacy is more than the sum of the state’s efforts to promote its laws. Rather than focus only on didactic legal education, this study identifies acts of imagination. Ordinary people deployed legal language outside the courtroom. Reading legal records alongside cultural and political artifacts: plays, short stories, handbooks on family discipline, public signage, cadre manuals, extrajudicial contracts, and advice columns this research describes the legal consciousness of the less-than-literate and the circulation of new vocabularies of adjudication and legal ideas. Today, when China’s government subverts rights to the interests of the party, this portrait of the vernacular law in Republican China will remind the world of the forgotten origins of Chinese legal dreams.

Biography: 
Johanna S. Ransmeier is a social and legal historian of modern China. Her current research investigates the expansion of legal literacy and the development of a Chinese legal imagination. She also studies the surprising ways crime and the law intersect with family life. Her first book Sold People: Traffickers and Family Life in North China (Harvard University Press, 2017) exposed the transactional foundations of traditional family structures and the role of human trafficking in late Qing and Republican China.  She earned her doctorate from Yale University and is a graduate of Amherst College. She is fellow in the National Committee on US China Relations-Public Intellectuals Program (cohort V) and was recently visiting research fellow at the Institute of Modern History at Academia Sinica in Taiwan. Her research has been funded by the Fulbright Association, the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), Fonds de Recherche du Québec (FQRSC), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Ransmeier received the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2022. She is associate professor of history at the University of Chicago where she also co-chairs the faculty board of the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights.