Granting and Limiting Divorce in Ancient China in the Context of Big Data Technology

Abstract

Divorce has been a significant societal issue since antiquity, warranting careful scholarly attention. The evolution of divorce systems from ancient times to the present day mirrors broader societal, ideological, and marital transformations. This paper presents an analytical exploration of the social implications of ancient divorce legislation through the lens of four historical divorce models. By assembling a corpus of ancient divorce texts and employing the vector space model for data representation, this study leverages the TF-IDF algorithm for keyword extraction. Subsequently, it utilizes a keyword co-occurrence network to scrutinize pivotal elements within the ancient divorce systems. Furthermore, the study employs the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model to investigate the thematic evolution of these systems. Analysis of the corpus reveals that the term “separation” appears 513 times, underscoring its prevalence. The keyword co-occurrence network exhibits a point degree centrality of 0.523, indicating significant interconnectivity. The principal legal term, “shall,” occurs 68 times, reflecting its normative importance. Notably, the study identifies subtle variations in legal stipulations across different dynasties, primarily concerning changes in the grounds and moral considerations for divorce. These historical divorce systems were profoundly influenced by the dynamics of marital relationships, as well as patriarchal, familial, and societal constraints. This historical perspective offers valuable insights for contemporary marital law implementations, suggesting a nuanced understanding of divorce’s legal and social dimensions.