Ownership and Possession in Qing China

The Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University presents a talk with Kentaro Matsubara on the new framework for understanding the Qing property regime.

Professor Matsubara will present a new framework for understanding the Qing property regime. He will reinterpret the relationship between several categories of property rights and transactions that were widely used in traditional China, focusing on the particular terms denoting title and/or possession, the significance of which has hitherto only partially been brought out in scholarly debates. In his presentation, he will discuss Japanese legal scholarship going back to the various custom surveys and related analyses in the first half of the twentieth century and reinterpret these arguments in the light of recent scholarly findings on local social structures and the diverse social dynamics that formed Qing society.

Kentaro Matsubara is professor of law at the University of Tokyo. He specializes in legal history and has worked on such institutions as ancestral (lineage) property and traditional land rights in China in the nineteenth and twentieth century, linking them to the processes of social structuring and formation of the state. Professor Matsubara has an LLB from the University of Tokyo and a DPhil from Oxford. He has held research and teaching positions at the University of Hong Kong, Columbia Law School, and Yale University. His book Law of the Ancestors: Property Rights and the Lineage in South China will be published in 2013.

Dinner Option
We welcome participants who wish to attend both sessions of the New England China Seminar to join colleagues for a buffet dinner at 6:30-7:30 pm, in Room S153. The dinner cost is $15 per person ($10 for students). Due to space limitations, we will accept 30 reservations on a first come first serve basis. Advance reservation and payment is required. Please register by clicking here before noon on Thursday, September 6, 2012.