The popularization of basic legal knowledge is an important and contested technique of state governance in China today. Its roots reach back to the early years of Chinese Communist Party rule. Legal Lessons tells the story of how the party-state attempted to mobilize ordinary citizens to learn laws during the early years of the Mao period (1949–1976) and in the decade after Mao’s death.

Examining case studies such as the dissemination of the 1950 Marriage Law and successive constitutions since 1954 in Beijing and Shanghai, Jennifer Altehenger traces the dissemination of legal knowledge at different levels of state and society. Archival records, internal publications, periodicals, advice manuals, memoirs, and colorful propaganda materials reveal how official attempts to determine and promote “correct” understandings of laws intersected with people’s interpretations of written laws and with their experiences of laws in practice. They also show how diverse groups—including party-state leadership, legal experts, publishers, writers, artists, and local officials, along with ordinary people—helped to define the meaning of laws in China’s socialist society. Placing mass legal education and law propaganda at the center of analysis, Legal Lessons offers a new perspective on the sociocultural and political history of law in socialist China.

"While the book is focused on China’s two most important urban centers, Altehenger’s careful work in the Beijing and Shanghai archives, complemented by local gazetteers and restricted internal documents, rewards readers with a multilayered depiction of cultural work in the PRC." - China Journal

"This terrific book makes a significant contribution to the understanding of propaganda in China as well as to the fields of law, politics and history of the PRC…Altehenger’s analysis contributes mightily to our understanding of the period that she examines, but also is useful in appreciating the dilemmas of law in China today." - China Quarterly

"A thorough and accessible account of a very complex and important topic, and it deserves wide readership. The book will prove especially helpful for researchers interested in the PRC legal system, Chinese legal history, China’s governance capacity, and its state-society relations." - China Review International

"Drawing upon abundant archival records, internal reports, newspapers, and posters, Altehenger offers a fresh look into the CCP’s campaigns of disseminating legal knowledge. Her vivid accounts not only demonstrate the significant role of mass legal education in China’s socialist governance, but also disclose the complex dynamics between party leaders, propaganda officials, state and private publishers, and cultural workers in various campaigns." - Pacific Affairs

"A pioneering account of how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) endeavored to use legal propaganda to mold ideological consciousness and valorize the disparate phases of its revolution between 1949 and 1989…Altehenger has filled a key gap in the literature on the PRC legal system with an engaging, richly sourced study that bridges multiple fields of scholarship…Her book will appeal to historians of modern China, culture, and law, as well as to observers of the contemporary PRC, and that is an exceptional feat." - Law and History Review

"Exhaustively researched and methodologically innovative, Legal Lessons is a must-read not only for PRC historians but also for legal historians of China and elsewhere. It redresses a glaring paucity of scholarship in an important field and provides a deeply textured narrative of the continued tussle between state and society over the varied meanings of law. By crossing important epochal divides, it also places China’s ongoing legal reforms in their proper historical context to demonstrate how they were not exclusively inventions of the post-Mao government seeking to rebuild its political legitimacy and rejoin the global economy." - PRC History Review

"An important work for scholars interested in the cultural dimensions of the law, Maoist-era mass political campaigns, and the comparative study of socialist states." - Twentieth-Century China