Research On The Archival Legislations And Regulations Of The Republic Of China

Archival legislations and regulations are the component elements and legal infrastructure of the nation's archival undertaking. They reflect to some extent the maturity of the nation's archival practices and the degree of democracy and legislation in this field, as well as the nation's legislation level as a whole.During the period of the Republic of China, the legislation of archives experienced historic changes in comparison with the previous dynasty. Archival management had been embodied into administrative legislation formally and special efforts had been made on the legislation of archival practices. Moreover, archival laws emerged as independent administrative laws. Definitely, such transformations brought fresh energy and vitality to the archival practices of that time.This dissertation focuses on archival legislations and regulations during the period of the Republic of China with the aim at clarifying the great achievements gained in this field. I shall review the actual development of archival legislations and regulations of the Republic of China from the viewpoints of work procedure and administrative mechanism of the paperwork and archive management. Furthermore, I shall take one step forward to analyze the motivation, nature, characteristics and historic influences of the development of archival legislations and regulations of the Republic of China. As a consequence, I reveal the gradually evolution from tradition to modern of archival legislations and regulations of the Republic of China.This dissertation will probe into the relevant contents in archival legislations and regulations of the Republic of China, and will make supplements and corrections to the previous research on the subject. Researches of this paper reveal that as the direct achievement of archival legislation, the archival legislations and regulations of the Republic of China reflect both in contents and the format the characteristics and trends of that era. Numerous legislation s and regulations related to papers processing, archive management, archival institution, archival worker, and archival managerial system, etc. are created. Besides numerous quantities, these legislations and regulations covered a wide range and formed a system. What's more, the principle of democracy and liberty which was carried out universally by the legislations and regulations of the time became the most important sign for the modernization of archival law of China. The dissertation points out that the gradual advancement in the regulations of records processing were indicated by the diverse principles of paperwork, repeated modification of document pattern, more complicated processing procedure, and the gradually matured system for paperwork. The inheritance and development of the Classification method, the initial forming of archive appraisal theories and standards, gradual standardization of archive retention periods, and the pioneer reference system for archive opening are then the essential milestones of the archival legislations and regulations modernization. The archival legislations and regulations of the Republic of China are characterized not only by the concrete progress of the paperwork and archival procedures, but also by the general historic development of archival system, institution, and human resource, etc. In this special era, both internal and external causes contributed to the modernization of the archival legislations and regulations. The internal causes include more awareness of archive value by the society, the practical needs of agency work, the appeal to arrange historical records of Min & Qing dynasties by academic circle. The external causes are the progressing of domestic democracy and legislation, the development of abroad archival practices and so on.In spite of all the achievements, the archive legislations and regulations still represented the interests of the capitalists. Therefore, we should not ignore such defects. The archival legislations and regulations of time had fundamental influences upon the archival legislations and regulations system of the People's Republic of China as well as the Taiwan area. Some archival provisions and practical customs in the mainland and most regulations implemented in Taiwan today are originated from archival legislations and regulations of the Republic of China indeed.In the conclusion part of the dissertation, I summarizes the experiences and lessons obtained from the practices of archival legislations and regulations of the Republic of China, and points out the enlightenments for the work of our time. It is necessary to draw lessons from history in the construction of archival legislations and regulations of our socialist country. In addition, we should make the best use of those experiences while avoid the drawbacks of that period.