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The past decade has witnessed an amazing acceleration in the development of private international law legislation in China as well as a signicant progress in the quality thereof. In 2010, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress adopted China’s rst statute on private international law (Private International Law Act). The adoption of the Act is a historic event in Chinese legislative history, as it indicates that China has modernised its conflict of law rules after many years of unremitting eorts made by legislators and scholars. Moreover, the Supreme People’s Court of the PRC promulgated an Interpretation (I) of the Private International Law Act in 2013. The Interpretation (I) attempts to provide concrete explanations on the abstract articles mainly in Chapter One of the Act and to create new provisions to close the legal loopholes. In this respect, the adoption of the Interpretation (I) can be regarded as a large step towards building a modern private international law system. Hence, Chinese private international law has witnessed a silent revolution.

As its heading suggests, this lecture seeks to make an objective and comprehensive…

Family law for a long time was only centred on one particular family unit: a man and a woman united in (indissoluble) marriage, and with children. But we now live in a world where marriages often end in divorce; where categories of gender are not as fixed as they used to be and legal men can give birth to children; where children are not necessarily genetically related to their birthparents or indeed may have three genetic parents, and even more social parents. The law has been too slow to react to societal changes and medical advances, and these issues need to be dealt with as a matter of urgency.

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