Chinese Pawn Legal System

The pawn is an important method of financing in China and other nations, which is convenient and quick for exchange of money and is being utilized until now.The pawn is regarded as the lien, which means the borrower borrows money from the pawnshop, and delivers his chattel to the pawnshop. If he couldn't refund the corpus and the interests within the specific period to redeem his chattel, the title of deposition of the chattel is going to belon to the pawnshop, which is regarded as a charge for the money borrowed by the borrower.The pawn has been endowed with the new connotation, which caused serious challenge to the traditional theories of civil law. The practice of pawn is not in line with the traditional civil law theories, which arouses a lot of confusion and disorder when people use this method of financing. So, this paper research on this issue by the way of legal analysis. In this paper, the author studies the pawn by using the theory of civil law in order to be beneficial to the legislation of the pawn and the development of the pawnshop in the future.The structure of the paper is divided into four parts as below:Chapter one discusses the principal legal problems of the pawn. Firstly, This chapter specifies the concepts. The author holds that the pawn being used today is a sort of custom that evolved from the Dian and the Dang, which has never been divided in the Chinese traditional society. Then, the paper introduces the characteristic and the essence of the pawn. The author believes that its nature should belong to the special type of security interest, i.e., business lien. There are two aspects of the characteristic of the pawn, i.e., one aspect represents the characteristic of finance which includes small quantum, short-term, usury, safety and convenience, the other shows characteristic of law including the specific main body, particular setup, particular content, choice of realization. Finally, this part introduces the function of the pawn, specially analyzing the most important function of finance.In Chapter two, the author firstly explains the main body, the object and the content of the legal relationship of the pawn. Specially, the object is the main target to be analyzed. Then, this section discusses the reason of the termination of the legal relationship of the pawn. Finally, it compares the pawn with some similar conceptions.In the third part, the author compares several models of legislation on the law of the pawn broking in the world. The section introduces the legislation model in USA, England, Switzerland, Singapore and Malaysia, simultaneously, recommends the model in Hongkong and Taiwan of China. Then, it generalizes the advanced experience of the legislation. Finally, the author observes and studies the present situation of the law on pawn broking.In the forth part, the author provides the suggestions of legislation on the basis of the former demonstration. Firstly, the paper appraised the existent issues. Then, the author illustrates the practical value and the principles of perfecting the Pawn Law. Finally, the paper puts forward some suggestions about the Pawn Law in the future.