Talk by Li Chen, J.D. (UIUC) and Ph.D. (Columbia), Associate Professor of Chinese History at the University of Toronto, with a cross-appointment at the Faculty of Law.
Monday, November 10, 2025
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Bunche Hall 6275
This talk examines the hidden role of legal advisors (
muyou) in Qing local administration and the forms of power they exercised behind the scenes. Drawing on case records, draft memorials, internal yamen paperwork, and judicial handbooks, it reconstructs how advisors drafted judgments, managed procedural routines, and guided magistrates through daily administration while remaining officially unnamed. Traces such as private seals, handwriting, and marginal notes reveal their indispensable contributions to the functioning of local yamen. By bringing these practices to light, the talk challenges conventional views that render legal advisors marginal and shows how bureaucratic expertise, as much as Confucian ideology, sustained Qing governance. It also considers the broader implications of how technical knowledge and documentary practice generated invisible forms of power in late imperial China and in comparative histories of bureaucracy.
Li Chen, J.D. (UIUC) and Ph.D. (Columbia), is Associate Professor of Chinese History at the University of Toronto, with a cross-appointment at the Faculty of Law. Among his extensive publications on the intersection of law, culture, and politics in Chinese and international history, his first monograph,
Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes: Sovereignty, Justice, and Transcultural Politics (Columbia University Press, 2016), received the 2018 Joseph Levenson Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies and Honorable Mention for the 2017 Peter Gonville Stein Book Award of the American Society for Legal History. He has just completed another monograph,
Invisible Power and Technocratic Governance: Legal Specialists, Juridical Capital, and Ideological Politics in Late Imperial China, c. 1650–1910. He serves on the editorial boards of
Law and History Review, Law & Social Inquiry, and
Journal of World History, and was the founding President (2014–2017) and is current Director of the International Society for Chinese Law and History.
Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies, Department of History