[3] The Five Punishments in the Code contained in Article 1 are:[5] A traditional Chinese legal system was largely in place during the Qin dynasty.
In practice, however, large sections of the code and its sub-statutes dealt with matters that would properly be characterized as civil law.
The populace made extensive use (perhaps a third of all cases) of the local magistrate courts to bring suits or threaten to sue on a whole range of civil disputes, characterized as "minor matters" in the Qing Code.
Moreover, in practice, magistrates frequently tempered the application of the code by taking prevalent local customs into account in their decisions.
[citation needed] The First and Second Opium Wars between the Qing dynasty and several Western powers led to the forced signing of several unequal treaties by the Chinese government, which granted subjects of the foreign nations in question extraterritoriality in China, which included being exempted from the Great Qing Legal Code.
[7] In the late Qing dynasty, there was a concerted effort to establish legal codes based on European models as a part of the Self-Strengthening Movement.
[citation needed] In the early 20th century, with the advent of the "Constitutional Movement", the imperial government was forced by various pressures to modernize its legal system quickly.
Finally, in 1927, Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang government attempted to develop Western-style legal and penal systems.
Law in the Republic of China on Taiwan today is based on the German-based legal system brought by the Kuomintang.
One legacy from that bygone era is the offense of "murder of a family member" (e.g. patricide and matricide), which entails life imprisonment or death under Section 1 of Article 272 of the Criminal Code.
While the legal system in the People's Republic of China was, and to some extent still is, based on socialist law, it incorporates certain aspects of the Qing Code, most notably the notion that offenders should be shamed into repentance.
This took the form of the practice of parading condemned criminals in public from 1927 (the beginning of the Agrarian Revolutionary War) to 1988, when "the declaration of the Supreme People's Court, the Supreme People's Procuratorate and the Ministry of Public Security on resolutely stopping the street display of convicted and unconvicted criminals" was issued.
In Hong Kong, after the establishment of British rule in 1841, the Great Qing Legal Code remained in force for the local Chinese population.