LRCCS Noon Lecture Series ~ Rewriting the Creation Myth: Revolution and the Birth of the PRC Judicial System

This talk will challenge traditional understandings of the 1949 revolution, and of the nature of CCP legal traditions. Drawing on new archival evidence, it presents a fresh take on judicial practice in the CCP’s pre-1949 base areas, the controversies over the abrogation of the Nationalist legal system (1949), and on the traumas of the Judicial Reform Campaign (1952-53) and the Anti-Rightist Campaign (1957-58).

Glenn Tiffert is a historian of modern China, who focuses on its twentieth-century legal systems. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and has published on the drafting of the 1954 PRC constitution, and the introduction of modern courts during the Republican period. He has also written forthcoming studies of the creation of the Republican judiciary, and of how legal knowledge and education were reconstituted in the early PRC. Today’s talk is based in part on his dissertation entitled, “Judging Revolution: Beijing and the Birth of the PRC Judicial System (1906-1958)."