Currently, China is drafting its new Civil Code. Against this background, the Chinese legal community has shown a growing interest in various legal and legislative ideas from around the world. "Towards a Chinese Civil Code" aims at providing the necessary historical and comparative legal perspectives. The book addresses the following topics: property law, contract law, tort law and civil procedure.

What changes occurred and what remained the same in Chinese civil justice from the Qing to the Republic? Drawing on archival records of actual cases, this study provides a new understanding of late imperial and Republican Chinese law. It also casts a new light on Chinese law by emphasizing rural areas and by comparing the old and the new.

A unique comparative analysis of Chinese contract law accessible to lawyers from civil, common, and mixed law jurisdictions.

This book is the first attempt in the English language to study and evaluate the new Chinese Civil Code.

At the outset of the Nanjing decade (1928-1937), a small group of Chinese legal elites worked to codify the terms that would bring the institutions of marriage and family into the modern world. Their deliberations produced the Republican Civil Code of 1929-1930, the first Chinese law code endowed with the principle of individual rights and gender equality. In the decades that followed, hundreds of thousands of women and men adopted the new marriage laws and brought myriad domestic grievances before the courts. Intolerable Cruelty thoughtfully explores key issues in modern Chinese history, including state-society relations, social transformation, and gender relations in the context of the Republican Chinese experiment with liberal modernity. Investigating both the codification process and the subsequent implementation of the Code, Margaret Kuo deftly challenges arguments that discount Republican law as an elite pursuit that failed to exert much influence beyond modernized urban households. She reconsiders the dominant narratives of the 1930s and 1940s as "dark years" for Chinese women. Instead, she convincingly recasts the history of these years from the perspective of women who actively and successfully engaged the law to improve their lives.

This detailed analysis of the content and configuration of civil codes in diverse jurisdictions also examines their relationship with some branches of private law as: family law, commercial law, consumer law and private international law. It analyzes the codification, decodification and recodification processes illuminating the dialogue between current codes – and private law legislation in general – with Constitutions and International Conventions. The commentary elucidates the changing requirements of civil law as it shifted from an early protection of patrimony to a support for commercial and contractual law. It also explains the varying trajectories of civil law, which in some jurisdictions was merged with religious legal tenets in its codification of familial relations, while in others it was fused with commercial law or, indeed, codified from scratch as a discrete legal corpus. Elsewhere, the volume provides material on differing approaches to consumer law, where relevant legislation may be scattered across numerous statutes, and also on private international law, a topic of increasing relevance in a world where business corporations have interests in multiple jurisdictions (and often play one off against another). The volume features invited contributions from leading scholars in the field of private law brought together for an in depth analysis of the current regulatory attitude in this field of the law in jurisdictions with diverse legal systems and traditions. In current times we are witnessing the adoption of diverging regulatory solutions. Through the analysis of the past and present of private law regulation, the volume unveils the underlying trends and relevance of the codification method across the world.

This volume offers a unique, comprehensive view of the contents, context and potential of the Civil Code that in 2021 entered into force in the People’s Republic of China. The twenty-three essays herein collected, authored by distinguished Chinese and non-Chinese scholars, describe inner and outer perceptions about the Chinese Civil Code and analyze its likely impact within and outside the country. In so doing, they shed light not only on the comparative origins of current Chinese rules, but also on the potential influence that these rules may have in comparative terms in the future.

Currently, China is drafting its new Civil Code. Against this background, the Chinese legal community has shown a growing interest in various legal and legislative ideas from around the world. Within this context, the present book aims at providing the necessary historical and comparative legal perspectives. It concentrates on substantive private law and civil procedure, both in China and in other jurisdictions. These perspectives are of considerable importance for the present codification work. Additionally, the book is dedicated to commemorating the centennial of the first Western-influenced and civil law-oriented Civil Code of China, the Da Qing Min Lü Cao An of 1911. The following topics are addressed: property law, contract law, tort law and civil procedure. The book also contains contributions on codification experiences in Europe and on the concept of codification in general. The topics are discussed by leading Chinese and international scholars. Most of the Chinese contributors have taken part in preparing the Chinese Draft Civil Code. The book is the outcome of a conference organized by the Centre for Chinese and Comparative Law (RCCL), School of Law, City University of Hong Kong, in October 2010.

This book provides a comparative analysis of Chinese property law as depicted in the newly enacted Chinese Civil Code. The Chinese Civil Code, the first civil code in the history of the People’s Republic of China, was enacted as law in May 2020. Reflecting the growing interest in this code and its provisions to scholars of codification and of comparative private law, it has already been translated into English, German, and Italian. Chinese property law has both local and global features, and this comparative study offers a channel through which to understand Chinese property law, by highlighting both its similarities and differences from other property systems. Broadly speaking, the book brings together two approaches. The first comprises a comprehensive discussion of aspects of Chinese property law, such as ownership, property rights, and secured transactions. The second consists of perspectives from other jurisdictions and provides an assessment of Chinese property law based on other property systems. Containing contributions by both distinguished and young scholars, who are experienced in comparative property law research, the book offers a unique insight into the Chinese Civil Code and, through it, how extra-civilian elements are embodied in a fundamentally civilian legal system. This book will appeal to scholars and students of property law, comparative law, and others with specific interests in law and politics in China.