THE GENESIS AND EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF CIVIL LAW IN ANCIENT CHINA DURING THE PRE-QIN PERIOD

The article is devoted to a historical‑legal analysis of the emergence and early development of private‑law norms in Ancient China during the pre‑Qin era, encompassing the periods of the Xia, Shang (Yin) and Western Zhou dynasties. The authors criticize both the retrospective projection of modern civil‑law categories onto archaic social structures and the denial of the very possibility of private‑law institutions in early Chinese polities and instead propose to treat pre‑Qin regulation as an autonomous normative phenomenon. The first part demonstrates that in the Xia period the foundation of the regulation of relations was the ritual li, which arose as a sacred rite but gradually transformed into a universal code of proper conduct that ensured the political and social hierarchy of society and defined the framework of proprietary and other private relations. The subsequent analysis, based on divinatory inscriptions and written sources of the Shang period, reveals the formation of norms governing proprietary relations, personal status, slavery, marriage and succession, under which land and slaves appear as the key objects of rights, while the sphere of private law is rigidly subordinated to the interests of the state and the aristocracy. The evolution of matrimonial and succession institutions is examined, including changes in the procedure for the transfer of supreme power within the ruling house, the differentiation of the status of legitimate and illegitimate children and the entrenchment of the priority of the eldest legitimate son as a mechanism for concentrating power and property within aristocratic lineages. The conclusion substantiates the argument that the pre‑Qin system for regulating private relations constituted a complex, ritually grounded and multilayered normative model in which religious, moral and legal prescriptions operated in unity and that recourse to this model has methodological significance for comparative‑legal research and for reconsidering Eurocentric conceptions of the legal development of early historical forms of the socio‑political organization of Chinese society.