Calculating Crime and Punishment: Unofficial Law Enforcement, Quantification, and Legitimacy in Early Imperial China

This article analyzes the rules and practices of unofficial law enforcement as reflected in recently excavated legal manuscripts from the Qin and Western Han periods (221 B.C.-9 C.E.). I argue that, apart from limiting the potential abuses of the system such as excessive use of violence and arbitrary accusations, these regulations pursued an important ideological goal. By establishing encompassing, number-based hierarchies of crime, punishment, reward, and responsibility, legislators sought to make the society “legible” not only for the state but also for its common members, which was essential for legitimation of the empire in the eyes of its subjects. Early empires’ effort to promulgate number-based matrices for various social situations, including judicial ones, was an effective solution to the problem of legitimizing imperial order by offering people an effective mechanism of improving their social standing and boosting wealth through participation in the legal institutions. Even when attempting to manipulate the system, individuals implicitly recognized the official legislation as a source of practical taxonomies to structure thinking about obligation, responsibility, and limits of legitimate self-interested behavior.