Article: ‘Beneficiaries’ under the Chinese Charitable Trust

Hui Jing (The University of Hong Kong) recently published an article entitled, ‘Beneficiaries’ under the Chinese Charitable Trust. Provided below is the abstract to the Article:

This article examines the role of objects in the Chinese charitable trust. At common law, charitable trusts are purpose trusts and therefore they do not have beneficiaries is already very much the orthodox view. In contrast, the terms ‘beneficiary’ and ‘beneficiaries’ are widely used in legislative texts concerning the Chinese charitable trust. However, the law makes no mention of how the concept of ‘beneficiary’ should be understood in the context of Chinese charitable trusts. Two arguments have been raised by scholars and practitioners: the beneficiary argument and the recipient argument. This article examines the way in which the two arguments are developed and the extent to which they shed light on the legal nature of Chinese charitable trusts. It argues that the beneficiary-recipient arguments are premised on the private law understanding of standing and are unable to provide a whole picture of the role of objects under a Chinese charitable trust. Following on this reasoning, this article outlines the public law norms that legislators have incorporated into the structure of the Chinese charitable trust, and discusses the insights that these norms can provide into the analysis of an object’s role in the context of Chinese charitable trusts.