This chapter does not intend to summarize what Chinese civil law has undergone in the past 40 years from 1978 to 2018, in terms of which laws have been enacted, which theoretical topics have changed, what issues have been subject to sustained and in-depth discussion by academia, and what consensus has been reached. This does not mean that such matters are unimportant but, rather, that many similar overviews already exist and are well understood in academia. The focus here is on the changes in mainstream economic policy pursued by Chinese civil law academia over the past 40 years and the corresponding interpretation at the basic level of civil law theory. Arguably, no other sectoral law has been so closely linked to each stage of China’s economic system reform as civil law (Liang 1989). Together with the change in the economic system from a planned economy to a planned commodity economy, followed by a socialist market economy, China’s civil law academia has experienced a transformation from a marginal state in which the need for its existence was still questioned, to the General Principles of the Civil Law in 1986, which declared the status of civil law, and highlighted its rapid development into one of the principal branches of law after 1992 (Zhu 2004). It also described the current process of Chinese civil law codification, which has laid the foundation for establishing a socialist state under the rule of law (Xue 2014). In my view, the development of Chinese civil law can be attributed to the sustained and prompt interpretation of the intention of China’s economic system reform over the past 40 years by civil law scholars in terms of legislation and theoretical research.