COPY for Lionel Curtis Esq.
Sir Cecil Hurst, G.C.M.G.
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23rd April, 1930.
49
My dear Hurst,
Your work at the Foreign Office must, of course, have brought you into contact with the lamentable condition of China from a legal and judicial point of view, but I do not think anything that appears in published official documents reveals the real depths of the abyss out of which China is still struggling to emerge and the clogs which fetter her efforts.
The
The attempt to build up a new legal system and new courts for the administration of justice began, of course, long ago, before the revolution. It has been carried on more or less during the troubles and civil wars of the last 20 years. difficulty of this task is greatly enhanced by the fact that China's old ideas as to the administration of justice were apparently quite different to the European ideas which she has now set herself to adopt. In the old days the administration of justice seems to have been regarded as part of the general work of administration, to be left in a great measure to the discretion of individual officials who exercised both judicial and executive functions. The idea of a recognised body of law, uniformly interpreted and applied throughout the country by the decisions of courts distinct from and independent of the executive authorities, is, therefore, a new idea quite alien to the political conceptions formerly prevailing in China.
A number of voluminous codes have now been promulgated, but from what people tell me it scoms at least doubtful whether any serious attempt is made to apply them even in many of the so- called "modern" courts. It is probable that a very large proportion of the judges and of the Chinese lawyers are still ignorant of most of their provisions, and that many would be
The natural quite incapable at present of understanding them. tendency of both Bar and Bench is to cling to old ideas, and it cannot, of course, be expected that the process of transplanting wholesale to China the provisions of Continental codes can be immediately effective in altoring the old habits of the courts
I am afraid there with regard to the administration of the law. must at present be a great deal of sham about this business of It is transforming and modernising the legal system of China. absurd to expect that such an immense task could be achieved in a few years even if the country had not been afflicted, and torn in pieces, by a scries of revolutions and civil wars, though all credit is due to the few Chinese reformers who have been honestly tackling it; and the codes themselves, I am told,
I have not yet are, on the whole, creditable achievements. attempted to wade through the translations of them which are now being issued.
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