NPC adopts Civil Code
Protection of private rights ‘puts people first’
If someone steals my virtual goods in a video game, can I get them back? Can my unborn baby inherit property? Can I sue someone for using my voice for deep faking? Now, you can get the answers to all these questions simply by opening the encyclopedia of your life, China’s first Civil Code, which has been adopted by the nation’s top legislature.
Chinese lawmakers on Thursday voted to adopt the long-expected Civil Code at the third session of the 13th National People’s Congress (NPC). The Civil Code will take effect on January 1, 2021.
China’s first law with “code” in its name, the Civil Code is a wideranging legislative package that aims to provide legal protection of private rights including property, contracts, personality, inheritance, marriage and family. The Civil Code, which puts people’s interests at the center and responds to major public concerns, takes China’s legal system in terms of private rights protection to a new level, and it reflects the Communist
Party of China’s governing philosophy of “putting people first,” analysts said.
During the third session of the 13th NPC, which concluded on Thursday, NPC deputies made some 100 changes to the draft Civil Code that was first unveiled in December 2019.
Those changes include expanding the definition of sexual assault to include using texts and images to assault others, not only just speeches and actions.
The 1,260-article draft has seven parts: general provisions, property, contracts, personality rights, marriage and family, inheritance and tort liability.
The highlight of the world’s latest modern-day civil law is that personality rights have become an independent part of the law. This indicates that China’s new law has made up for the defects of the traditional Continental law system, which puts more emphasis on property than people.
The Civil Code responds to all kinds of challenges of protecting one’s personality rights in the internet era, analysts said.
The personality rights part describes in detail the rights of reputation, name, image and privacy. Rights of voice, name and property in the virtual world are mentioned for the first time in any Civil Code in the world, which fully reflects the “internet feature” of the law as it keeps pace with the times, said Zhu Wei, a professor at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing.
Zhu told the Global Times that the personality rights section will become the chief basis for the protection of online personality rights.
On Thursday, several Civil Coderelated topics trended on China’s social media. Among them, the topic of a cooling-off period for divorce attracted more than 800 million views on Sina Weibo.
The law introduces a cooling-off period for couples who apply for a divorce amid soaring divorce rates in recent years. Zhu said this provision does not mean that China isn’t protecting people’s freedom to marry; instead, it shows that the law has the function of correcting improper social customs.