| Tort liability system in ancient China originated in the Qin and Han Dynasties,developed greatly in the Tang Dynasty,and then went through the development of the Song,Yuan,Ming and Qing Dynasties,until it was relatively complete in the Qing Dynasty.However,after reading the laws and regulations of different dynasties,we can easily find that the provisions on tort liability are scattered in various laws and regulations all the time,which are quite scattered.Therefore,there was no systematic tort law in ancient China,which made the people’s rights could not be guaranteed accordingly.At the end of Qing Dynasty,great changes took place in socioeconomic structure.The spread of western legal thought in our country made the public consciousness of rights gradually awaken.At the same time,influenced by the tide of codification of civil law in Europe and Japan,the Qing government began the legal reform and completed the first draft of the civil code in the history of China--Draft Civil Law of Qing Dynasty which opened up the process of the modernization of the civil law in China and the pace of the modernization of the tort law in China.Therefore,the constitutive elements of the tort liability system,the types of tort acts and the methods of bearing the liability were systematically stipulated in the draft of the civil code in the late Qing Dynasty for the first time.The system of tort liability in the late Qing Dynasty was a systematic whole with independent sections.It not only drew lessons from the advanced contents of German and Japanese tort laws in content,but also reserved some local legal resources in China.In the process of formulating the tort law,there are many things worth learning from.The Qing government carried out a wide range of social investigation,based on the local,combined the Chinese and Western,and achieved a revolutionary change in the legislative thought of the tort law.But it relied too much on the civil code of Germany and Japan in the process of formulation,and excessively transplanted the content of the tort law of Germany and Japan.Besides,the collected civil practices were not made full use of,causing the not enough reservation of local outstanding legal resources in China.We also need to learn lessons from it to further improve the system of tort liability law of our country. |
