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European Business Organization Law Review 14: 465-467 465
2013 T.M.C.ASSER PRESS
Lei Chen and C.H. (Remco) van Rhee, eds., Towards a Chinese Civil Code: Comparative and Historical Perspectives (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers), 562 pp., ISBN: 9789004204874
doi:10.1017/S156675291200122X
Edited by Lei Chen and C.H. (Remco) van Rhee, this volume is a joint intellectual endeavour by twenty-one fine scholars from eight jurisdictions, collectively addressing some of the most intriguing questions in Chinese and comparative civil law: will the future Civil Code of the Peoples Republic of China, if and when it comes into being, be based on a European civil law model, a common law mode or a mix of these models (p. 2) or will it, simply, be uniquely Chinese? What can be learnt from the codification experiences, be it success or failure, in history and in other jurisdictions? What are the characteristics that will distinguish the future Chinese Civil Code from its Western predecessors and counterparts? While within China much ink has been spilled over these and related questions, relatively little has been written in English outside of the country. This volume, apparently the first book in English on the draft Chinese Civil Code, helps fill this important gap, offering a compelling glimpse into Chinas project of civil law codification from historical and comparative perspectives.
When taking a look at the comparative history of civil law codification, one may arrive at an impressionist observation widely shared among Chinese civil lawyers: the birth of some of the monumental civil codes coincided with the turn of the century. Napoleons Civil Code came into force in the early nineteenth century (1804). The final enactment of the German Civil Code (BGB) took place in the late nineteenth century (1896) and its coming into force was postponed to the symbolically loaded date of 1 January 1900 (p. 312). Whether, and why, this was so should perhaps be addressed in a full monograph and is beyond the scope of this review. The point is that, coincidentally, at the turn...