Civil Code of the PRC

The Civil Code of the People's Republic of China (中华人民共和国民法典) is the first statute in the PRC's history to bear the title "Code" (法典), adopted by the Third Session of the Thirteenth National People's Congress on 28 May 2020 and entering into force on 1 January 2021. It supersedes and consolidates the General Principles of the Civil Law (1986), the General Provisions of the Civil Law (2017), the Contract Law (1999), the Property Law (2007), the Tort Liability Law (2009), the Marriage Law, the Adoption Law, the Succession Law and the Security Law, repealing nine separate statutes upon its commencement. Comprising 1,260 articles across seven books plus supplementary provisions, it codifies decades of fragmented civil legislation into a single architecture and is officially celebrated as a milestone in "law-based governance" (依法治国) and the building of a socialist rule-of-law system under the Xi Jinping leadership.

Structurally the Code opens with General Provisions (Book One), which restate the principles of equality, voluntariness, fairness, good faith and public order and good morals, and recognise the equal protection of state, collective and private property. The subsequent books treat Real Rights (物权), Contracts, Personality Rights (人格权), Marriage and Family, Inheritance, and Tort Liability. The standalone Book Four on Personality Rights is widely regarded as a global innovation, expressly protecting the rights to life, body, health, name, likeness, reputation, honour, privacy and personal information, and addressing sexual harassment, organ donation and emerging concerns such as biometric and genetic data. Notable provisions include the thirty-day "cooling-off period" (离婚冷静期) for divorce by agreement under Article 1077, residential land-use renewal under Article 359, the "good Samaritan" voluntary-rescue immunity of Article 184, and rules on liability for objects thrown from buildings (Article 1254).

Since its 2021 entry into force the Supreme People's Court has issued successive judicial interpretations operationalising the Code, including interpretations on the General Provisions and on the Marriage and Family Book, and continues to refine its application; as of 2026 the Code remains the foundational instrument of Chinese private law and a centrepiece of official propaganda on the rule of law, frequently invoked in policy documents promoting "the spirit of the Civil Code." It is taught as evidence of legislative consolidation and modernisation of governance rather than as a vehicle of Western-style constitutionalism.

For the China civil-service examinations the Civil Code is high-frequency material. In the Shenlun (申论) paper it furnishes ready-made argumentative scaffolding for essays on rule of law, social governance, protection of citizens' rights, and the relationship between law and morality—candidates are expected to cite it as a marker of governance modernisation. The Public Basic Knowledge (公共基础知识) component tests specific provisions: the divorce cooling-off period, personality rights, the good-Samaritan clause and property-rights protections recur in objective questions. Typical question angles ask candidates to explain the Code's significance for "全面依法治国" or to apply a named article to a factual scenario, so memorising flagship provisions and their article numbers is advised.