Filial Piety across Legal Systems: Analysing the Influence of Traditional Chinese Legal Culture of Property in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China

Abstract

This article explores and compares the influence of traditional Chinese legal culture of property on contemporary Chinese societies of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China, who share the same legal cultural heritage but have developed different legal systems under different socio-political environment. These three jurisdictions now proclaim adherence to Westernised legal principles of private property and individual ownership. But in Confucian-dominated traditional China where family was the core societal unit, property was recognised for their collective value, and ownership was structured in network ties of relationships to preserve filial-piety-based sociomoral order. Such property practices and norms form an integral part of traditional Chinese legal culture. By examining the approaches in which customary property-holding practices have been codified, and the reasoning made by courts in parent-child property disputes, this article unveils the interpretive and adaptive ingenuity in which the three Chinese societies embrace Confucian ethos and traditional Chinese legal culture. The article suggests that the differences with the ways divergence between state-imposed systems and social norms are handled may be explained by the nature of legal systems, and that the courts of the three jurisdictions, as they apply Westernised prescripts, display similar tendency to treat belonging and kinship as central components of property.