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| The Legitimate Ground for Divorce in the Transitional Society |
| Guo Ye |
| Law School, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China |
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Abstract We are in the transition period from traditional society to modern society and are in the historical process of comprehensive modernization. Divorce can be called a seed of social change, deeply hidden in the secret of social transformation and change, reflecting historical dialectics of “change” and “unchanged” in the field of marriage and family. The legitimate ground for divorce in China that is in transition can be summed up as follows：First, the freedom of divorce is a sign of social civilization. It is a social revolution, which changes the idea of marriage from person-as-a-means to person-as-an-end. It is also the product of political liberation and the result of economic progress, which still plays the role of exorcism of barbarism and evil shadow in modern society.Second, divorce is a legalized right to personality. The right to divorce, as the subject’ right to change family status (from spouse to single person), belongs to the category of personality right in essence. Divorce is endowed with the value of personal freedom and human dignity, and contains the transformation of marriage law from “identity” to “contract”. As a legal right of personality, its connotation includes divorce freedom, divorce equality, human dignity, human well-being and other factors.Third, the divorce system is the necessary legal system for the transformation of society. Marriage is divorced from the traditional family hierarchy, but is still limited by family ethics. Marriage and family exist as institutionalized facts and form a unified system in the modern society. The divorce system is connected with marriage and family in content, and carries the core value of marriage and family in a jurisprudential sense.Fourth, divorce is the legal confirmation of the death of love. Objectively, the essential measure of the state of marriage lies in love, and the law of marriage is not to change but to confirm the state of marriage. Divorce is a confirmation of the demise of love, which is why the Chinese Civil Code has used “incompatibility” as the legal reason for divorce.Fifth, divorce is the legal dissolution of the marriage contract. Marriage is a contract of life with love as the medium of credit. It should conform to the spirit of contract law, which means autonomy and good credit. If one of the spouses violates the spirit of the contract law, the other has absolute legitimate grounds to request the dissolution of the marriage.Sixth, divorce procedures are a well-intentioned protection of the married family. In modern legal countries, marriage is a normative relationship, which is guaranteed by legal procedures. The purpose of procedures such as “divorce calm period” is to avoid willfulness of divorce, balance the interests of all parties, and safeguard Good Order & Custom, which is an important embodiment of procedure justice.All the above shows that divorce law is a mirror of transforming China, which reflects the remarkable characteristics of Chinese society from tradition to modernity, from identity to contract, from etiquette to legal reason. In the historical process of China’s progress towards a modernized powerful country, family modernization is an essential and important link.
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Received: 16 September 2020
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2021, Vol. 51 
