Research On Elderly Guardianship System

Since the21st century, the aging of populations has become a global problem. As a developing country, China has entered the aged society in2000. The high aging speed of China has brought widespread and profound impact to its economy and the welfare of its people. Guardianship system is an important civil system. However, along with uprising of the concept of human rights, the idea of guardianship legislation also renews unceasingly. It becomes more and more difficult for the traditional elderly guardianship system to cope with the new challenge brought about by society aging. Therefore, many countries have started the legislative reform process to their elderly guardianship system. China’s civil law, at present, only stipulated that Alzheimer’s patients are suitable to the mental patient monitoring provisions (i.e. the17th and19th provisions of the civil law). But only these two laws cannot meet the needs of elderly guardianship. Now, the research on aging problem mainly focuses in sociology, economic, demography and medicine, but neglects the constitution of the civil law system. To protect the rights of senior citizens at the greatest degree, satisfy their mental needs and physical needs, it’s imperative to construct a complete elderly guardianship system in our country.This thesis focuses on the research of legal system of elderly guardianship, and we divide our research results into four chapters.The first chapter provides an overview of the elderly guardianship system. This chapter presents the definitions, characteristics, and natures of the elderly guardianship system, as well the necessity to establish an elderly guardianship system in China. About the definition of the elderly guardianship, the academies have different viewpoints. The author reviews these viewpoints and proposes the author’s unique viewpoints which are based on the analysis of senior citizens’ characteristics. The author analyzes the characteristic of elderly guardianship from three angles:its objectives, methods and contents.(1) This chapter also reviews existing viewpoints of the elderly guardianship, and presents the author’s comments.(2) By analyzing the challenges facing the elderly people of our country, we analyze the legal and economic meanings of establishing an elderly guardian system in our society.(3) We summarize the irresistible reasons for China to establish an elderly guardian system.The second chapter adopts the principle of comparative jurisprudence, and investigates the elder guardianship systems within the countries of continental law systems and common law systems, as well as Taiwan’s elderly guardianship system. In continental law countries, the elderly guardianship systems are inherited from Roman’s law, but have been reformed during the period of society aging. This chapter surveys the elder guardianship system of France, Sweden, German and Japan. For the common law countries, they had reformed their traditional elder guardianship system, on1950. The author introduced the USA’s unified legal system for authorizing agency power and the UK’s legal system of lasting agency power. We also analyze the revised civil law of Taiwan and introduce laws for guardianship declaration and supporting declaration. We then summarize the similarities of the existing legal systems for elder guardianship, which can provide a reference to China’s elderly guardianship system.The third chapter investigates the current status of China’s elder guardianship system. We list the legal terms for the guardian personnel, guardianship configurations, and guardianship responsibilities. We also point out several flaws of our country’s elder guardianship system, such as the narrowness in the targeted objects, the fall behind of the basic concepts for elderly guardianship legislation, the simplicity in guardianship methods, the ossification of guardianship standards, the inappropriateness in choosing guardian personnel, and the in-clarity in the guardian rights and responsibilities. This chapter highlights the necessity of establishing the elderly guardianship system in our country as soon as possible, which will fill the blank in our country’s legislation.The fourth chapter discusses how to improve the elderly guardianship system in China. The author proposed to comply with the global-scale trend in setting up guardianship legislation system. The author also propose to adopt the two basic legislative principles in global guardianship legislation systems, i.e."respects myself self-decision-making power" and "maintains myself to live the normalization". Besides borrowing ideas from the abroad experiences in setting up guardianship legislation system, the author proposed to fit the national condition of China. The author proposes constructive suggestions to satisfy the material needs of senior citizens in China and also to satisfy their mental needs.