Thinking on State Governance Function of China’s ‘Civil Code’

The basic starting point of this article is to accurately interpret the meaning of the compilation of The Chinese Civil Code; that is, the compilation of the civil code is not for political propaganda but rather to provide basic compliance for governing the country by law. The compilation of the civil code is one of several major decisions of the Central Committee regarding comprehensively promoting the rule of law. This article discusses the basic way that civil law accomplishes the mission of national governance and the legal norms it relies on, that is, behavioral norms and judgment norms. Among them, the role of behavioral norms is to guide civil subjects to engage in civil activities, while the role of adjudication norms is to provide judicial organs and law enforcement agencies with a basis for clarifying right and wrong and for adjudicating rights, obligations and responsibilities. The reason civil law is the basic rule of state governance and plays a fundamental and overall role in the overall governance of the country is because the legal norms of civil law involve every natural person and every legal person or other organization in society; these norms also involve the most basic personal rights and property rights. It is precisely because of this that the civil code occupies the status of the basic law in the legal system on which the entire national governance of our country depends. The compilation of the civil code has made the large number of civil law norms both scientific and systematic. On the basis of summarizing the experience of more than 40 years of reform and opening up, the compilation of The Chinese Civil Code has realized the systematic transformation of the basic system of civil law. In addition, the compilation of the civil code has not only corrected the original legislative fragmentation problem of the coexistence of multiple laws and achieved the goal of systematizing basic civil laws but also systematically made up for the shortcomings of the General Principles of Civil Law formulated under the planned economic system. We have corrected the major mistake that the Contract Law did not meet the requirements of the modern market system, we have solved the inherent problems caused by the long-term separation of the marriage law from the civil law system, and we have established the logical relationship of “basic law-special law” for special civil law outside the civil code to achieve the harmony and unity of the “big civil law system” that has provided the basic compliance for the unified application of the law.