Using court cases culled from various national and local archives in China, this article examines two strategies widely employed by Qing litigants to manipulate state-sponsored filiality to advance their perceived interests in court: “instrumental filicide to lodge a false accusation” and “false accusation of unfiliality.” While Qing subjects were willing and able to exploit the legalized inequality between parent and child for profit-seeking purposes, the Qing imperial state tolerated such maneuvering so as to co-opt local negotiations to reinforce orthodox notions of the parent–child hierarchy in its subjects’ everyday lives. Local actors, who appealed to the Qing legal promotion of parental dominance and filial obedience to empower themselves, were recruited into the Qing state's project of moral penetration and social control, with law functioning as a conduit and instrument that gave the design of “ruling the empire through the principle of filial piety” a concrete legal form in imperial governance.

This article argues that claims about the different economic trajectories of early modern Europe and late imperial China have incorrectly focused on the importance of formal contract enforcement mechanisms. As a first step toward more productive conversations about the history of economic development across world regions, this article provides a look at the factors in the development of the late imperial Chinese economy that led to the emergence of contract enforcement mechanisms not based on codified contract law. Several case studies from the Qing dynasty Chongqing archives are presented to illustrate how the mechanisms of contract enforcement operated.

In modern scholarship, much ink has been spilled over the significance of St. Augustine in the history of Western philosophy and theology. However, little effort has been made to clarify the legacy of Augustine in East Asia, especially his contribution to China during the early Jesuit missionary work through the Maritime Silk Road. The present article attempts to fill this lacuna and provide a philosophical analysis of the encounter of Chinese indigenous religions with St Augustine, by inquiring into why and how Augustine was taken as a model for the Chinese in their acceptance of the Christian faith. The analysis is split into three parts. The first part reflects on the contemporary disputations over the quality of the paraphrasing work of the early Jesuits, analyzing the validity of the allegedly careless inaccuracies in their introduction of Augustine's biography. The second part analyses some rarely discussed Chinese translations of Augustine, which I recently found in the Nanjing Union Theological Seminary, with particular focus on their ideological context. In particular, the paraphrased text concerning Augustine's theory of sin and the two cities will be highlighted. The third part goes a step further in exploring the reason why Augustine was considered an additional advantage in dealing with the conflicts between Christian and Confucian values. The primary contribution this essay makes is to present a philosophical inquiry into the role of Augustine in the early acceptance of Christianity in China by suggesting that a strategy of “Confucian-Christian synthesis” had been adopted by the Jesuit missionaries. Thereby, they accommodated Confucian terms without dropping the core values of the orthodox Catholic faith. The conclusion revisits the critics’ arguments and sums up with an evaluation of the impact of Augustine's religious values in the indigenization of Christianity in China.

For almost five decades I have been studying Japanese philosophy, but only gradually have I come to realize there is no such thing. The ghost of Nakae Chōmin 中江 兆民 (1847–1901) probably gloats with satisfaction to hear this gaijin say that. My statement seems to echo his assessment more than a century ago when he pronounced that Japan had always been and continued to be devoid of philosophy. Although I admire Chōmin for his intellectual courage, standing up to the thought police even to the extent of being temporarily exiled from Tōkyō, my position is not at all the same as his. Nakae Chōmin is not only dead, but unfortunately, when it came to understanding both philosophy and its relation to Japan, he was also dead wrong. So although in reference to Japanese philosophy, I claim there is no such thing, I do not mean what Chōmin meant. To understand what I do mean, we have to examine my claim word by word.