China's Binary Social Structure Of Urban-Rural Division And The Realization Of Unitary Legal Order

Since the Qing dynasty, China begin to learn and transplant Western legal rules, however, there existed various problems in the application of legal rules, either the law had been avoided or cannot reach the anticipated effects, especially in some rural areas. What is the right choice for ruling of law in China? How can we constitute a unitary legal order which could guarantee the legal rules be applied in China, no matter in urban or rural areas? The scholars have caused a fierce controversy; everyone issued their own opinions but ignored the social structure background behind the law.The operation of legal system based on the social structure in specific time and space environment. The dilemma of the application of law in China originates from the traditional binary social structure of urban-rural division. The reason and characteristic of ancient city's origin which decide the division of urban and rural, and together with the rulers'dominant strategy in the rural area all contributed to the conformation of binary social structure. After the foundation of P. R. China, and due to the specific circumstances at that time, the strategy of giving priority to the development of heavy industry and the collectivization imposed in the rural area made the binary social structure still continue in China. Therefore, in this background, the legal rules transplanted from western commercial and industrial countries are running well in the urban area of China, but in the comparatively more traditional and closed rural area, the difference of economic foundation and culture values between urban and rural made the law inevitably invalid in some rural areas.Through the analysis of some cases happened in rural areas we can conclude that taking the folk law or state law as the solution depends on the circumstances of cases, which are usually at random. However, the basic demand of law lies in the unity and equality of law's application. The key reason of China which can not realize unitary legal order is the lack of a unified economic and culture platform to efficiently guarantee the law's running. No matter of taking the way to transplant western law or just basing on native resources, we all need a unitary social structure to integrate the law to the social's economic foundation and culture background. Only in this way, we could achieve the maximum unity of law's justice and efficiency value.Neither the realization of unitary legal order adapts the rural area to the urban state law nor does the city adjust to the folk laws. China's path of law needs all Chinese's common choice and repeating game, and finally it will reach to a legal landscape which corresponds with the most majority of people's demands and benefits. To achieve this goal, we should first reform the household registration and land system and establish an integrated urban and rural labor and land element market; then we could gradually phase out the dual social structure and create conditions for the interaction between urban and rural areas. Meanwhile, based on the background of China's low level economic development and people's income and through the application of game theory and information theory, the institution design could create conditions to build non-legal mechanism for cooperation. Through this, mechanism could induce people to cooperate and realize stable social order. This also coincides with China's traditional legal culture which emphasizes the importance of cooperation and provides a solution to realize the China's unitary legal order with low cost and high benefit.