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SUMMARY:THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF CHILDHOOD - ADJUDICATING JUVENILE OFFEND
 ERS IN WARTIME CHINA\, 1937-1945 - Lily Chang\, Magdalene College Cambridg
 e
DTSTART:20130211T160000Z
DTEND:20130211T183000Z
UID:TALK43169@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Alexis Artaud de La Ferriere
DESCRIPTION:At the turn of the twentieth century\, as major Western powers
  coped with the aftermath of the First World War and later the Great Depre
 ssion\, China was an isolated nation\, where after two thousand years of i
 mperial rule\, a republic was established and the monarchy was overthrown 
 by a group of revolutionaries. Despite such social and political changes\,
  it was also a time when China’s legal system remained in a state of flu
 x - a transitional period lodged somewhere between the imperial legal syst
 em and attempts to embrace new ideas and legal reforms imported from the W
 est.\nDrawing on previously unexamined archival legal case records from Ch
 ina and Taiwan\, this paper demonstrates the evolution and development in 
 the formation of ideas about the legal treatment of the young from the ear
 ly Republic to contemporary China. More specifically\, it examines how the
  outbreak of China’s War of Resistance against Japan from 1937 to 1945\,
  more commonly folded into the Pacific component of the Second World War\,
  served as a crucial catalyst to crystallising ideas on how the law should
  treat the young\, and the construction of the legal boundaries of childho
 od. The aim of this paper is to therefore demonstrate how courts attempted
  to challenge the liminal space occupied by juvenile offenders within the 
 legal sphere\, and examine how the social impact war on juveniles brought 
 about a new legal and social understanding of children and childhood in tw
 entieth-century China.\nAlthough the People’s Republic of China did not 
 formally develop a juvenile justice system until the early 1980s\, the jud
 icial landscape of contemporary China with respect to the concept of juven
 ile justice was forged from the fundamentals and precedence set during the
  wartime period\, which was later revived in the 1980s and 90s\, as part o
 f the country’s social and legal movement towards a rule of law. However
 \, Western\, Chinese\, and Japanese language scholarship on the developmen
 t of a juvenile justice system in contemporary China have largely neglecte
 d the importance of legal developments that occurred before the rise of th
 e Communist Party in 1949. Developments in the first half of the twentieth
  century therefore marked an important period of transition and transforma
 tion within the judicial realm for China\, as new legal norms were formed 
 and ideas of social justice were being tested.
LOCATION: Faculty of Education\, 184 Hills Road\, Cambridge\, CB2 8PQ in r
 oom 1S3
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