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The article discusses the use of false accusation (wugao) in Sichuan Province, China during the late Qing Dynasty, including its relationship with the legal culture at the time and magistrates' willingness to hear legal cases of malicious accusation. An overview of the Chinese tenant farmer Chen Bingtang's malicious accusation lawsuit case in court regarding the death of his son is provided.

The "Rules for Civil Litigation" (Zhuangshi Tiaoli) were the most important set of rules for local litigation in the Qing Dynasty. These rules, which had been printed on petition forms, were meant to control the procedures by which litigants filed complaints. The Qing Code was positive law mainly regarding crime and punishment, and litigation rules based on tradition and government's interests were not part of the Code. The rules were the most significant laws on litigation at the local level and were mostly uniform across Qing China. The Rules for Civil Litigation focused on limiting behavior of litigants before the yamen heard cases. Although The Rules for Civil Litigation contained important procedural rules, it actually served to facilitate acceptance of petitions and was aimed at keeping judicial order in the empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers how the Qing judiciary dealt with mentally ill individuals who had committed parricide. Archival cases show that parricide was always punished by dismemberment (lingchi), without taking the criminal's mental condition into account. Such inflexible attitude was not adopted without debate, however. It can be explained by the sacred nature of the filial relationship in traditional China, hence the barbarity of parricide; strengthening the legitimacy of the regime and the legality of the judicial process may also have been a factor. Yet an examination of the fundamental principles of traditional Chinese law and of the laws in force under the Qing shows that the punishment of parricidal lunatics was lacking firm legal grounds. Only with the first attempts at reforming Chinese law in depth in the early twentieth century did things start to change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at the regulations in eighteenth-century China aimed at prohibiting litigation masters (songsi) from making false accusations against members of the general population. The author believes that the sub-statutes of these regulations were rarely enforced due to the function of litigation masters as judicial representatives of civilians seeking justice. In order to reduce the interference of litigation masters the penalties for interfering in lawsuits were increased and the role of the official agency in writing legal documents was stressed by the government.