General Clauses and Practice : the Use of the Principle of Good Faith in the Decisions of Chinese Courts

The term ‘good faith’ or rather ‘objective good faith’ is the ‘king clause’ of People’s Republic of China (PRC) law. This is also tied to the value system implied by the Chinese term chengshi xinyong (诚实信用). This article offers an analysis of the Chinese term and how the PRC courts utilize the principle, which is a neologism from the 1931 Republican Civil Code, much infl uenced by German and Japanese laws. The introduction of the term in 1931 was meant to strike a balance between modernity and traditional Chinese values (中学为体,西学为用) and ‘good faith’s’ collective quality was considered instrumental to social justice. Socialist interpretation does not necessarily lead to particularly original solutions: The use of the notion of ‘good faith’ in a judicial context is consistent with the judicial practice in several countries belonging to a Western legal tradition. However, ‘good faith’ is often placed alongside traditional Chinese criteria such as ‘reasonableness’ (合理) and ‘fairness’ (公平), and as such ‘good faith’ is frequently used to achieve the end of ‘justice’ in specifi c cases, leading the author to conclude that the application of rules borrowed from Western legal cultures, in several cases, seemingly mirrored solutions developed within the Chinese tradition.