On The Legal System Of Private Donantions To Build

Private donations are an important component of private charities in our country ,and are indispensable to social security as an spontaneous self-help form of a civil society. But China's current charity legislation is rather backward. There is lacking in not only an Charity Promotion Act but also various professional donation laws. Although since 1999, the Law of the People's Republic of China on Public Welfare Donations has been enacted, the law does not govern the most basic and common behavior donating to specific individuals. According to our current legislation, the legal charities are merely three: "Foundations", "social groups", "private non-enterprise entities", which need severe requires to set up, in addition to rigorous examination and approval. For example, "Foundations" require a minimum initial capital of 2 million yuan; "social groups" require at least 50 individual members; "private non-enterprise units" are ruled to operate in dual management model, resulting in difficulties in defining which department to be in charge. However China has a tradition of charity for several thousand years, and activities of private donations in China, which are popular, spontaneous and can be done in a short time, are hard to be ruled by the current legal mechanism. So these activities can only struggle to survive in the state of "Law outside ", causing a mass of"grassroots charities" in our state, chaos in our private donations and a number of difficulties hard to resolve. On the other hand, Trusts Law has been formally introduced in China since 2001. Even though nothing has been done in our country in the field of Civil Trust, the history of the emergence and development of Trusts Law reflects the gift of Civil Trust in the domain of charities. Further more the thought of"using the principle of Civil Trusts"has been spreading in civil law countries .Thus it's reasonable to considering how to build our Private Trust on donations.This paper sums up the major legal dilemma in our private donations that is the lack of the relevant statutes, the imperfect legislation on subjects, and the inability of traditional legal mechanisms, from the perspective of typical legal disputes on private donations. And by exploring the history of the Civil Trust, it has been found that Civil Trust has made a significant contribution to the cause of private donations in Britain and America, and that civil law countries have the great potential in using Civil Trust in the activities of private donations. So there are reasons and comparative advantages to apply Civil Trust to private donations. Finally, based on the value goal of equal importance between efficiency and legal risk, this paper explores the mode to build our legal system of private donations, on the principle of pragmatism, and has constructed two kinds of our legal systems of Private Trust on private donations, which are Private Trust on private donations and Charitable Trust on private donations, owing to the specific forms of private donations in our country and the basic theory on Trusts.