Der Allgemeine Teil des neuen chinesischen Zivilgesetzbuchs im Vergleich zum deutschen BGB (Teil 1): Eine rechtswissenschaftliche und -terminologische Untersuchung der Rechtssubjektsregelungen

Abstract

On 1 January 2021, the newly codified Civil Code (CC) came into effect in the People’s Republic of China, having been high on the political and legislative agenda in recent years and approved by the National People’s Congress on 28 May 2020. Since the founding of the People’s Republic (1949), numerous attempts have been made to codify its civil law. The CC is undoubtedly a landmark in China’s overall legal history, particularly with regard to civil law legislation, which, in contrast to the country’s long and turbulent history, had only begun in the late Qing Dynasty (1911). Preceding the enactment of the CCL, the General Part of the Civil Law of the People’s Republic of China, to which the CC’s General Part is basically identical, had already been adopted and enacted in 2017. With this step, China’s legislators succeeded in replacing the General Principles of the Civil Law of the People’s Republic of China, which by then were already 31 years old, together with their supreme court interpretation, and finally set the course for the codification of the People’s Republic of China’s civil law. In view of the codificationhistorical and jurisprudential position of the CC’s General Part in China’s civil law and of the new codification as a whole, it is appropriate to present it to German-speaking and international legal experts, primarily in comparison with the General Part of the German Civil Code, which served or will serve as the most important foreign source of knowledge in the creation of the CC and in its application-related optimization. In this respect, this treatise, consisting of two parts, appreciates the renewal achievements of the CC’s General Part and examines its regulations in a comparative legal manner, focusing on the legal subjects, civil rights, legal transactions (including representation) and civil liability in terms of legal doctrine, technology and concepts.