The Origin, Historical Development And Desired Model Of Chinese Agricultural Cooperatives Legal Systems

The jurisprudence of Chinese legal systems of agricultural cooperatives has two different theorical sources. One is the Maxism theory on cooperatives, the other is the internationally recognized fundamental cooperative principles. The former didn’t regard cooperative as a tool to attain better individual economic condition, but both a kind of productive unit and a special form of social organizations to unite most individual agricultural producers on as vast a scale as possible in order to make whole national production proceeded in an organized way and in accordance with national overall plan. In order to achieve the goal, Maxism cooperative theory seeks for the systematic vertical relations of leadership and management among cooperatives. Subsequently, the theory becomed the direct ideological basis of the system of "integration of government administration with commune management" in socialist countries. The latter paid its attention to the independence and autonomy of cooperatives and users’central status in cooperatives, and laid down some basic operative principles such as voluntary and open membership, jointly-owned property, democratic member control, member economic participation, distribution among the members in proportion to their transactions with the society, and so on.Before1949, although the legal systems of agricultural cooperatives made by CPC authority had some revolutionary instrumental tint, they followed those fundmental cooperative principles above and their contents had become more and more detailed and exercisable. From the founding of PRC to the beginning of reform and opening up, in the process of the socialist transformation from dispersive individual agricultural economy to collective agricultural co-operation, Chinese agricultural cooperatives lost the inherent features of cooperatives under the system of people’s communes "social unity government" because of the dogmatic duplicate application of Maxism assumption about cooperatives. After the reform and opening-up policy, the family contractual management responsibility system has become new agricultural economic foundation. The policy and legal system of agricultural cooperatives has been adjusted and reformed correspondingly according to the new change aimed at recovering their cooperative characteristic of their own. During this period, some separate legislations about agricultural cooperatives which can meet the demand of the development of rural economy, embody the dominant character traits of cooperatives and conform with the up-to-date trend of international cooperative legislations has been made gradually. Law of farmers’ professional cooperatives is the remarkable example among these.There are many imperfections in Chinese acts about agricultural cooperative. Besides contradictions among those cooperative acts which was made during different periods and on various kinds of agricultural cooperatives, the lack of systematic jurisprudence of cooperatives was one of the most important reasons. Some main problems must be resolved to accomplish the construction of legal theory of cooperatives, the first is how to interpretate constructively the constitutional conclusion that cooperative economy belongs to the kind of collective ownership among working people. The second is how to improve and rebuild our own cooperative systems with ownership arrangement, management and supervision of cooperative business and property, allocation of surplus, and the relationship between cooperatives and governmental authority as the core on the basis of international principles and by reference to company law. In addition to this, regulations for the development of new generation cooperatives must be enacted to standard their behaviour and protect their lawful power and benefits.