Unexpected Borrowings: Viewing Chinese History through a Transnational Lens, 1895-1955

Over the past five years, policy changes and funding obstacles alike have significantly constrained historians’ ability to perform research on modern Chinese history. Rather than focusing on these limitations, however, scholars can take advantage of the opportunity to shift our attention towards regional and global connections with the aid of sources in Japan, Taiwan, and elsewhere. In the process, we can piece together complex exchanges of ideas and institutions that had a lasting impact on Chinese history. This talk will focus on three examples from Taiwan, where Japanese administrators claimed to reshape the island’s Qing-era practices to serve the needs of Japan’s colonial enterprise. They embarked upon an extensive survey of local civil customs, introduced flogging and provisions for summary judgment, and created special mediation courts for civil disputes. Each of these initiatives inspired similar efforts in China beginning at the turn of the twentieth century. The histories of their transmission and transformation can reveal much about Qing imperial ambitions, the political economy of the state-building process, and the ebb and flow of invented traditions.

George Remisovsky is an historian of modern China with a specific interest in the ways in which China’s interactions with its neighbors have shaped the legal institutions and dispute resolution practices of East Asia as a whole. His dissertation traces the links between efforts to create a Western-style civil legal system in late Qing and Republican China, earlier reforms in Meiji Japan, and changes to legal institutions on Taiwan as it switched between the control of the Qing and Japanese Empires. It argues that Japanese colonial experiments on Taiwan were central to the history of law in East Asia, particularly the development of the notion that mediation procedures better reflected a local culture of harmonious social relations than civil trials and courts. As his research shows, however, Colonial Taiwan was able to become a key nexus for these changes only because polities across the region had shared the same basic approach to civil disputes for more than a millennium.
 
George has also written on how lineages in southern China managed the succession of their common property and on the ways in which individuals involved in civil disputes in Qing and Republican China selected mediators from among their friends and neighbors. He is in the early stages of researching his second book-length project, which will trace the development of institutions tasked with policing corruption in late imperial and modern China in their global context.
 
George received his Ph.D. in History from Yale University (2024). Prior to arriving at Yale, he received an Honours Bachelor of Arts in History and International Relations from Trinity College, University of Toronto and was a Shanghai Government Scholar at Fudan University. His work has received the support of the Fulbright Program (Japan) and the Yale Council on East Asian Studies Prize Fellowship.