The Chinese Civil Code, approved on 28 May 2021, is an important code for several reasons: it is a synthesis of the Roman legal system, a privileged place collecting institutions and dogmatic systems through categories, institutes and principles that provides a careful and balanced synthesis of the matter it regulates. Besides the well-known and peculiar concepts of the civil law system encompassed by the Chinese Civil Code, socialism with Chinese characteristics and custom as source of law in the absence of statutory provisions set the Code between past and future with its own identity and the ability to adapt to the continuous and future changes of the surrounding reality. The only certainty in this continuous evolution of the surrounding reality, is that the Code belongs and is open to the system in a process of continuous and mutual enhancement and complementarity. The typical and distinctive patterns of Roman tradition are endorsed and combined with Chinese legal tradition for their interpretative value, both individually and in the context of the Code as a whole, to give certainty and solidity to a regulatory system meant to last over time.

The Chinese Civil Code went into effect on January 1, 2021, as the first civil code in the Communist China. Half a century of codification effort finally resulted in this much anticipated code. In its 1260 articles, the Code is divided into seven books. In a break with civilian traditions, the Chinese Civil Code divides obligations into contracts and torts, and it absorbs law of unjust enrichment into the book on contracts as quasi-contracts. Also, the book on law of personality focuses on privacy and data protection in an effort to tackle the legal challenges posed by the advancement of technology. Some of the problems that still need to be addressed for the Code to become successful come from the tensions between the rise of private law and the dominant state sector, the contradictions among legal transplants, and the clash between distributive and commutative justice. The author argues that solutions to some persistent problems require structural change in Chinese economy, doctrinal innovation, and conscientious acceptance of a law that is based upon philosophical ideas that differ from traditional Chinese moral philosophy.

The law scholars Weixing Shen and Yun Liu focus on China’s efforts in the field of AI regulation and spell out recent legislative actions. While there is no unified AI law today in China, many provisions from Chinese data protection law are in part applicable to AI systems. The authors particularly analyse the rights and obligations from the Chinese Data Security Law, the Chinese Civil Code, the E-Commerce Law, and the Personal Information Protection Law and explain the relevance of these regulations with regard to responsible AI and algorithm governance. The authors introduce as well the Draft Regulation in Internet Information Service Based on Algorithm Recommendation Technology. This adopts many AI specific principles such as transparency, fairness, and reasonableness. Regarding the widely discussed field of facial recognition by AI systems, they introduce a Draft Regulation, and a judicial Opinion by the Supreme People’s Court of China. Finally, Weixing Shen and Yun Liu refer to the AI Act proposed by the European Commission, which could also inspire future Chinese regulatory approaches.

As a response to the totalitarian monstrosities of the dehumanization of hundreds of millions of people in the Cultural Revolution, human dignity was enshrined in the Chinese Constitution, not only as a foundational right but also as a basic principle. The basic rights that are necessary to implement this basic principle were all enshrined in the Constitution. China has made notable progress in protecting the nonpolitical dignity of Chinese citizens by means of civil, criminal, and administrative law. However, constitutional principles and rights in China are not justiciable, which together with other factors, such as the nonexistence of a robust tribunal of public opinion, has led to the fact that the political dignity of Chinese citizens – something that is essential to their independence and autonomy — however remains unprotected in practice. There is still a long way to go for China to transform the constitutional dream of inviolable human dignity into a reality.