A Law to Liberate the People: Popularizing Legal Knowledge in the Early PRC

Abstract: Between 1951 and 1953, the PRC central government called out two national legal education campaigns to disseminate and implement the new Marriage Law. Many people in urban and rural China had had little previous contact with laws and legal texts. Few had ever read laws in their entirety and even fewer knew the precise wordings of individual laws. Legal education propaganda employed newspaper articles, novellas, short stories, comics, posters, drama and opera in an attempt to explain the law in the simplest terms. Artists, writers and playwrights, most of who had never before created works about law, were commissioned to devise legal education materials. These materials were supposed to be educational as well as entertaining and attract a variety of audiences from the rural peasantry to the urban working classes. This paper discusses such materials and the different ways in which the young party-state sought to impart basic legal knowledge to people living in the cities and vicinities of Shanghai, Beijing, Hangzhou and Shijiazhuang. Examining legal education propaganda, its production and local reception permits insights into the government’s attempt to stabilize its rule via law and create legitimacy and popular legality for its regime. Even though implementation of the law was exceedingly difficult at times, mass legal education became an important, and often overlooked, component of socialist state-building in the early 1950s and, with hindsight, a testing ground for similar efforts initiated in the early 1980s.