ABSTRACT
After a complete divorce in the early half of the last century from the traditional Confucian morality-fueled feudal legal system, the Chinese legal system has embarked on a new path for legal reform, in line with the rule-centeredness in the Anglo-Saxon formalist tradition. The foreignness of Western law in the old land has hardly been understandable to the Chinese people so that most Chinese have now tended to associate law with “rigidity” (or “bureaucracy” in a more colloquial expression).2 Ever since the beginning of the twenty-first century, in the recent call for Chinese cultural Renaissance, the softness or humane care in social and legal justice, a theme that was typical of the family-centered Confucian morality, is being discussed in conflict resolutions in institutional settings.3 What this chapter captures is the organizational discursive practice of a high-profiled civil case where different groups of people, laypeople, legal academics, and the institutional legal profession debate and negotiate the signifying of the “frozen embryo” and their conflicting perceptions and understandings of what social justice means. The question is twofold: how is social justice constructed at a time when there is need for the disadvantaged to get reward, and what is the extent to which the warm face of justice is perceived in a changing society? In other words, this chapter will explore the embodied experiences by people in their assessment of law. The recent “iconic” civil case about the legal fight of the shidu parents4 for the right to “inherit” the
frozen embryos left by their only child who died in a car accident provided the very case to examine this issue. Since how embryos relate to human life remains a significant yet complicated issue, the process of interpreting and translating the controversial “frozen embryos” in the said case with reference to both linguistic and social contextual frameworks manifests the fluid dynamics where the double faces of law as justice are discussed, interpreted, denied, and redefined. This paper thus joins the discussion on the intriguing yet troublesome relationship between law and ethics.5
