The Disputes Of Nationality Law Revision: Whether China Should Admit Dual Nationality

Since the humanity entered the 21st century, as a result of the continuous advance of globalization movement and the rapid development of science and technology, the international society has entered to a network and computers-based information era. With the deepening of China’s reform and opening up and rapid economic development, China’s environment of international and domestic immigration is undergoing rapidly change, the problem of nationality and the research of nationality system had became the new task before the government of China.After overthrowing the colonial rule of western countries, such as UK and France, the rising bourgeoisie were eager to delimit the sphere of influence, to stabilize the domestic political and economic order. Therefore, the legal sense’s nationality is actually the product of modern bourgeois democracy. In the narrow sense, nationality is the legal concept which refers specifically to the natural persons. Nationality is defined as the qualifications of natural persons belonging to certain country or state, and it is the only legal basis that certain states exercise diplomatic protection. Since nationality belongs to the domestic matters of sovereign states, each sovereign state has the right to determine who are their citizens and who are not their citizens according to their national conditions and nationality law. Different positive and negative nationality conflicts emerge because of the dissimilar legislation principles of different states. With the deepening movement of globalization, the phenomenon of dual nationality was more and more common in the world, therefore, the problem of dual nationality has became the focus of legislative amendments of nationality law. In recent years, It had been appealed by overseas Chinese in different occasions, which China should admit dual nationality. Is it necessary for China to admit dual nationality? If we should, how could we do? All these questions have became the emphasis which more and more scholars are discussing and focusing.Before China’s current Nationality Law which was enacted by the third conference of the fifth National People’s Congress on the September 10,1980, China has promulgated three Nationality Law Acts, i.e., the Nationality Regulation of 1909 enacted by Qing Dynasty, Nationality Law of Republic of China of 1912 enacted by the Beijing government and Nationality Law of Republic of China of 1929 enacted by the Nanjing government. Even China’s Nationality Law of 1980 has repeatedly stressed that the principle of non-recognition of dual nationality, but because nationality is the domestic matter of each sovereign country, there will still be a lot of nationality conflicts in China. Based on the achievements of other countries, which had admitted dual nationality before, my argument is constituted that we should design a limited dual nationality system which accords with the current domestic situation of China.In this paper, I make my arguments based on the theory of nationality and nationality conflict in the following three steps. In the first section, I describe the generation of nationality, the basic theory of nationality, the facts of dual nationality in China which cause by birth, marriage, adoption, naturalization and the special nationality systems of Hongkong and Macau and analyze the reason. In the second section, I expound the merits and demerits of dual nationality and analyze the formation of the two views, then I put forward my opinion that admitting dual nationality will be helpful to the introduction of overseas financial and intelligence resources, and will not cause the conflicts of judicial jurisdiction and diplomatic protection. In the last section, based on the analyze of dual nationality in the United States, Germany, India and Sweden, I finally draw a conclusion that China should admit limited dual nationality. I put forward my suggestions and views on how to organize the system of dual nationality law.