Доклады Международного конгресса ИИСАА. Т. 1

Доклады Международного конгресса по источниковедению и историографии стран Азии и Африки. Т. 1. 2020 379 Elena Kolpachkova (FAAS, SPbU, St Petersburg, Russia) Sources of Legal Terminology in Chinese Summary : The aim of this research is to analyse the Chinese legal terminology and to trace its connection with other legal systems. The law of the People’s Republic of China belongs to the continental system. It was formed after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 on the basis of the legal system of the USSR, with a number of specific national features and a significant number of legal terms recently borrowed from other languages. The lexical stratum in legal Chinese consists of a unique core originated from domestic culture and terms borrowed from legal systems of European countries. This paper examines in chronological order the most important factors for the development of legal terminology in Chinese history. Before the XX century, legal terminology in China was formed on the basis of Confucian categories and Confucian criminal codes, with the presumption of moral standards superseding the rule of law. In the framework of the doctrine of Legalism, the system of legal norms of Ancient China received a new impetus when Fajia established the written laws as the main source of law. Legislation in ancient China was officially called 刑 xing “criminal”, although it could regulate any legal relations, including procedural, civil and administrative ones; violation of the rules entailed criminal punishment. Many provisions of the criminal law directly referred to the concepts and ethical standards set forth in the canonical literature. Since the Middle Ages, China’s legislative tradition has seen continuity of the legal framework when the dynasty changed. Starting from the Qing Empire, a judicial precedent as a source of law has been used more and more often. As the judicial decisions made at higher courts were published and cited by law- yers and judges, they also acted as the source of terminology for legal practitioners. At the turn of the XX century, in the course of modernization and codification of the legal system of the Republic of China, a number of legal and economic terms from Japanese were borrowed into Chinese, thanks to the convenient hieroglyphic form that did not require significant adaptation in the recipient language. The next wave of law-making took place in the 1950s, when the PRC adopted the Romano-Germanic legal system and terminology from the USSR. Another wave of the last four decades started in the 1980s, was due to the economic reforms and openness in China. The modern legal terminology is characterized by a significant number of lexical units recently borrowed from foreign languages. Both scholars and lawyers usually agree that the continuous inflow of new legal terms to Chinese hinders