Abstract
The initial reaction of the foreigner upon his first contact with Chinese law and legal system is one of frustration and noncomprehension. Those given to facile generalization are apt to declare either that China is devoid of any serious juridical tradition or that it is still in a primitive state of legal development. But both of these conclusions are clearly false since the Middle Kingdom has a long and complex legal history, and, while certain jural notions of responsibility which characterize Western law have not come into being in the East, their absence is not proof of arrested growth but merely that jural problems are envisaged in another fashion in the Sinitic body politic. The basic fact which the foreigner slowly comes to recognize is that, while the need for justice is constant in any culture, in Chinese society it is attained in a unique fashion.
