Sex, Law and Society in Late Imperial China

State response to sexual crime as an indicator of social and demographic change in Qing dynasty China.

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Changes in the criminalization of sexual behaviour during the Qing dynasty indicate that the eighteenth century in China was a time of profound change in sexual matters. Shifts in official treatment of charges of adultery, rape, sodomy, widow chastity, and prostitution represented the imperial state's efforts to cope with disturbing social and demographic changes. The aim was to defend the peasant family against a swelling underclass of single, rogue males outside the family system who were demonized as sexual threats to the wives and daughters (and the young sons) of respectable households. The testimony, gleaned from local and central court archives, of such marginalized people as peasants, laborers, and beggars shows how people excluded from accepted patterns of marriage and household bonded with each other in unorthodox ways (combining sexual union with resource pooling and fictive kinship) to satisfy a range of human needs.