Klaus Mühlhahn is a professor in the Department of History. He has published widely on Chinese legal history and the history of criminal justice. Other areas of interest are colonial history, governance, and the world of the treaty ports.

Ethan Michelson is an assistant professor in the Departments of Sociology and East Asian Languages and Cultures. His research on Chinese lawyers and social conflict in rural China has been published in a variety of disciplinary and area studies journals.

Li Ke is pursuing a joint Ph.D. in the Departments of Sociology and Criminal Justice. Her main interests include the sociology of culture, gender, and historicized ethnography. Her dissertation will focus on migration and divorce in contemporary China.

Law has been inextricably intertwined with politics since the birth of Maoist China and was highly politicized during the Cultural Revolution. Only in the recent reform period has it begun to evolve, unevenly and slowly, into a distinct body of rules and regulations. But even in Maoist China the forced “withering away” of law was not unchallenged and uncontested. In this talk, Mühlhahn, Michelson,
and Li discuss the conflicts and struggles between the Communist Party and the legal profession in the 1950s and how these conflicts and clashes created distrust and bitterness that continue to animate contemporary legal reforms.