Epilogue: Virtual Constitutionalism in the Late Ming Dynasty

Abstract

Any historian of China knows that speaking of a Constitution, or of constitutionalism, or of constitutional control in Imperial China (late or otherwise), as I do, can only be by analogy. There was no such thing in Imperial China as a coherent legal text that would impose itself upon the holders of political power as well as on the ordinary citizens, and that would have to be referred to in order to verify the legality of the decisions and actions of the government and the regulations it promulgated.