The Research On The Legal System Of Charitable Trust Trustee

Charitable Trust is set up in the interest of public welfare, the purpose of whichis exclusively charitable and the beneficiary is uncertain. Trust Law of the People’sRepublic of China was issued in2001and Chapter Ⅵ(fifteen articles in total)stipulated the legal system of charitable trust. In the following years, there’re nocharitable trusts created and the provisions have remained unused for a few years.Until2008, a catastrophic earthquake measuring8.0on the Richter scale struckWenchuan County in Sichuan, causing severe casualties and property losses. With aview to support the reconstruction of the disaster areas, the China Banking RegulatoryCommission (CBRC) issued the Notice of the General Office of China BankingRegulatory Commission on the Encouragement of Charitable Trust Business of TrustCompanies to Support Post-Earthquake Reconstruction. Under the encouragement ofthe CBRC, the first charitable trust——“5�'12earthquake-relief charitable trust” wasset up successfully. In the same year, there are some charitable trusts, such as“Zhengzhou Charitable Trust” and “Chongqing Charitable Trust” being carried outwith the purpose of helping the disabled and supporting education. After that thedevelopment of the charitable trust has stagnated. There are only two or threecharitable trusts with small scale set up since2011. Therefore, in order to stimulatingthe development of domestic Charitable Trust, it’s necessary to study on the legalsystem of charitable trust and ascertain the truth that Charitable Trust is underdeveloped.Like other trusts, the Charitable Trust trustee plays a key role in the legalrelationships of the trust. In addition, the Charitable Trust trustee has othercharacteristics like the uncertainty of the beneficiaries, which willmake the beneficiaries hard to exercise their legal rights. Therefore, it’s important tostructure a well-developed system of Charitable Trust trustee. This paper will studyon the domestic Charitable Trust Trustee system and use the experience of othercountries for reference.The structure of the paper is as follows:ChapterⅠ explores the history and the definition of the trust and make acomparison between charitable trust and foundation, points out that Charitable Trustdo not have organization structure which can save cost during the administration,there is a low fund requirement to entry for Charitable Trust and the trustee mustcomply with his fiduciary duties during the administration of the trust assets. Thetrustee will be supervised by the public welfare administration authority, the trustsupervisor, the settlor and the beneficiaries. Chapter Ⅱsummarizes and makescomments on the practice and legislation of the domestic Charitable Trust, on thebasis of which finding out deficiencies, such as there are small number of CharitableTrusts in China, the trustee is single and most of the Charitable Trusts in China wereset up by trust companies. In this paper, the author tried to study on the provisions inthe relevant regulations, and find that the provisions of the registration andsupervision of the trustee are too general which is not operable when put into practice.In order to finding ways to promote the domestic Charitable Trust system, Chapter Ⅲintroduces the charitable trust system and relevant experience on charitable trust ofAmerica, England, Japan and Taiwan Province. Chapter Ⅳmakes recommendationssuch as stipulating limitations of the trustee eligibility, expanding the eligibility of thetrustee, adopting registration system instead of licensing system and set up specialregistration and supervision authority.