The legal culture of People's Republic of China, as well as its social and economic culture, continues to undergo dramatic change since the People's Republic of China's reforms of 1978. Transformation has occurred by legal modernisation whereby a rule of law has been suggested to replace the rule of man. The latter is a characteristic of the traditional rural Chinese society where unwritten rules, personal relationships and trust govern citizens' legal relationships; analogous to gemeinschaft. In the modern society of China, institutional, customary and legal reform (a rule of law that embodies universal rules uniformly enforced by a centralised and bureaucratic state) is necessary to govern legal relations; analogous to gesellschaft.