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Almost every civilization throughout history has used symbols to represent justice, and it is widely known that in many cases, the balance as a symbol has had a very deep relation to justice. The aim of this essay, is to investigate the functions and the meanings of the balance as a symbol of justice in Chinese civilization by interpreting Chinese stories of trial-after-death and the traditional Chinese concept of the balance comparing it with the functions and the meanings of the western balance of Justitia, the Goddess of justice and with respect to its importance the modernization of the Chinese legal system.
My conclusion is that the meaning and function of the symbolic balance in Chinese legal history should not be regarded as equivalent to those of the Western world. The reason that the ancient Chinese and Western conceptualizations of the balance differ is due to fundamental differences in the way the two cultures historically regarded justice, which were manifested in the structures of the balance they used.
While the balance used by the Roman goddess Justitia finds justice by weighing good against evil on a relative basis, the judges in Chinese story use balances to weigh good separately from evil in absolute quantities. Therefore the Chinese balance which illustrates justice will always be even-leading to the synonymity of the words balance and balancing weight-while the western balance finds justice only by tilting. In this way, the Chinese conception of justice does not involve the idea of judgment, or choosing between two choices, in the same way as the western conception.
Where the characteristic nature of Western justice is symbolized by Justitia`s balance, as the objective and accurate judging of a loser and winner, the nature of Chinese justice, as symbolized by the balancing weight, is the right use of administrative power to achieve equilibrium between the judge and the accused with respect to punishment. while the European balance represents judiciary justice, the Chinese balance represents the administrative justice which is deeply rooted in the culture of Confucianism.
The balance as a symbol of justice in contemporary China has appeared only after the traditional Chinese legal system collapsed and revolutionized after the model of Western legal system as the Grand Court Revision(Da-li-si 大理寺) was abolished and renamed the High Court of Justice(Da-li-yuan 大理院) in 1907.
This was a revolution in the legal history of China, in the sense that China began, for the first time in the thousands years of legal history, to practice the judiciary from of justice associated with the western trial of Latin origin.

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