Article 1122
An estate is a personal legal property left behind by a natural person upon his or her death.
An inheritance that is not allowed to be inherited in accordance with the law or by its nature shall not be inherited.
I. Purpose of this Article
This article is about the scope of the estate.
II. Evolution of the Provisions
With regard to the scope of inheritance, Article 3 of the original Inheritance Law stipulates in the mode of "summary + enumeration": "An inheritance is the personal legal property left behind by a citizen when he or she dies, including: (1) a citizen's income, (2) a citizen's house, savings and daily necessities, (3) a citizen's forests, livestock and poultry, (4) a citizen's cultural relics and library materials, (5) a means of production permitted by law to be owned by a citizen, (6) a citizen's property rights in copyrights and patent rights, and (7) other lawful property of a citizen." "When the original Inheritance Law was drafted and enacted, the market economy on the mainland had not yet been established, the property owned by the people was limited, and the concept of private property was not strong. With the continuous development of the socialist market economy, the types of property in economic life are rich and diverse, and new types of property are constantly emerging, and the General Provisions of the Civil Code also stipulate the types of property rights. On the one hand, it retains the general provision of Article 3 of the original Inheritance Law, that is, "the inheritance is the personal legal property left by a natural person when he or she dies", and at the same time discards the enumerated provisions of Article 3 of the original Inheritance Law, and adds a negative exclusion provision, making it clear that "an inheritance that cannot be inherited in accordance with the provisions of the law or according to its nature shall not be inherited".
3. Interpretation of Provisions
This article is about the scope of the estate.
The scope of the estate refers to the scope of the property left by the decedent at the time of his death that can be inherited as the decedent of the estate. There are different legislative precedents for the definition of the scope of inheritance: (1) exclusion, which only stipulates what rights and obligations cannot be inherited, and excludes the rights and obligations that cannot be inherited from the scope of inheritance, and the rights and obligations that are not excluded can be inheritance; (2) enumeration, which stipulates what rights and obligations can be inherited, and enumerates the scope of rights and obligations included in the estate, and the rights and obligations that are not enumerated as inheritance do not belong to the inheritance; (3) the combination of enumeration and exclusion not only enumerates the scope of property that can be inherited, but also stipulates the rights and obligations that cannot be included in the estate.
The Inheritance Law adopts the third type of legislation, and this article adopts the first type of legislation, which is an exclusionary type, that is, the personal legal property left behind by a natural person other than the law or by its nature at the time of death is an inheritance. The exclusions are: (1) property that cannot be inherited in accordance with the law, such as the right to use state-owned resources, which can be acquired and enjoyed by natural persons in accordance with the law, but shall not be inherited as an inheritance, and if the heir wants to engage in the business originally engaged in by the decedent, and must obtain the right to use state-owned resources, it shall be re-applied for and approved by the competent department, and cannot be obtained as a matter of course on the basis of the right of inheritance. (2) Property that cannot be inherited according to its nature, such as property rights in the nature of bereavement pension and relief that are inseparable from the person of a natural person, such as pensions, subsidies, disability allowances, relief funds, minimum living allowances, etc., belong exclusively to the natural person and cannot be inherited by the heirs as an inheritance.
4. Cases
Li Jia v. Li B, a dispute over the inheritance of land contracting and management rights
Facts: Li B and Li Jia are sisters and brothers, and the two live together with their father Li and mother Zhou. When the first round of household contract management of rural land was implemented, Li's family obtained the right to contract and manage 6.68 mu of land. Since then, Li Yi and Li Jia have married one after another and started their own families. When the second round of household contract management was implemented, the rural collective economic organization redivided the contract management rights of the original land of Li's family, and each of the three families received an appropriate share of the land and obtained the corresponding contract management right certificate. Subsequently, Li transferred the contracted land to the villagers of the village for operation, and the circulation agreement was signed by Li Yi. After the death of Li and Zhou, the circulation income of the land contracted by their families was occupied by Li Yi. Li Jia sued the court, requesting the court to confirm his inheritance rights to the land contracted by his parents. The court held that the right to contract and operate the disputed land belonged to Li's family and was contracted by family contracting, and the disputed land was not forest land, so after the death of Mr. and Mrs. Li, the land at issue should be recovered by the local rural collective economic organization and then distributed separately, and the heirs of Mr. and Mrs. Li could not continue to contract, let alone treat the contracting right of the disputed agricultural land as the inheritance of Mr. and Mrs. Li's estate.
5. Analysis
There are two types of rural land contract management rights in mainland China: household contracting and other contracting methods. The main purpose of implementing rural land contract management in the form of household contract is to provide basic livelihood guarantee for every member of the rural collective economic organization, and the contracting party is the peasant household of the collective economic organization. The essential characteristic of this type of contracting is that the peasant households within the collective economic organization are the units that carry out the rural land contract management. Therefore, this form of rural land contract management rights can only belong to the peasant households, and cannot belong to a single family member. Whether in accordance with the provisions of the Inheritance Law or Article 1122 of the Civil Code, an estate is the personal legal property left by a natural person upon his death, except where it is prohibited by law or by its nature. In this case, the right to contract and operate rural land is not personal property, and after the death of Mr. and Mrs. Li, the land at issue should be returned to the local rural collective economic organization for separate distribution, and the heirs of Mr. and Mrs. Li cannot continue to contract, let alone treat the contract right of the disputed agricultural land as the inheritance of Mr. and Mrs. Li.