Shen Jiaben and the Late Qing Legal Reform (1901–1911)

Shen Jiaben, the late Qing scholar-bureaucrat, was made into a hero by the times during the Xin Zheng period which was a reaction to the failed 103-Days Reform in 1898 characterized by utopianism. Shen’s experience within the bureaucracy and his pragmatic approach in reforms were needed by the Qing rulers at that time. Shen was gradually forgotten after the collapse of the Qing dynasty and the repeated failures of the Chinese attempts to achieve constitutionalism. He was re-discovered in the last two decades among mainland China scholars, because his piece by piece approach in reforming the legal system without grand theories happened to be in agreement with the atmosphere among Chinese scholars, who after the failure of the 1989 Tiananmen Event, had gradually developed a consensus to reform China’s political system piece by piece, not through grand theories.