Innovations, Evolution and Further Development of Book Three Contracts of the Civil Code of the People’s Republic of China

Abstract

Book Three Contracts of the Civil Code of the People’s Republic of China (hereinafter the Civil Code) is structurally organized as an independent book and adheres to the legislative tradition of the integration of civil and commercial law. This represents an innovation in the history of the legal system and has laid a solid foundation for building China’s independent knowledge system of contract law. In terms of underlying values, Book Three Contracts has distinctive Chinese characteristics: It reflects the core socialist values and embodies both the principle of protecting weaker parties and the green principle. In terms of institutional rules, it introduces numerous innovations and actively responds to the needs arising from China’s social development and the lives of its people. In the five years since the Civil Code came into effect, legal scholarship and judicial practice have taken the provisions of Book Three Contracts as the basis of positive law and have promoted the evolution and further development of theories and concrete adjudicative rules, including the independence of claim-obligation contracts, the criteria for determining mandatory provisions, the identification and consequences of preliminary contracts, the validity and consequences of paying a debt in kind, and the conditions for contract rescission by the breaching party. To be sure, after the promulgation of the Civil Code, many issues remain contested and require further study and discussion, including causa, natural obligations, the criteria for selecting typical contracts, the differentiation between civil and commercial subjects in the application of legal rules, the construction of the internal system of quasi-contracts, and the coherence and distinction between default liability and tort liability.

Keywords

the Civil Code / Book Three Contracts / causa / natural obligations / quasicontracts

Rights & permissions

Higher Education Press