Legislative Perfection of the Application of Law System for Foreign-Related Products Liability in China

Abstract

During the process of the development of global economy, the contacts between countries in the area of international trade becoming more and more frequent. In the meantime, the number of issues on products liability between nations rises sharply as well. In order to protect the rights of consumers, close attention has been paid to the problems on products liability in all the countries. However, the regulations on products liability are very different because of the different legal systems they belong to, and there diversified background of politics and economy. These differences lead to conflict of laws among the nations inevitability. In order to solve these problems, many countries have established their choice of law rules for products liability. In China, There are no special choice of law rules on foreign‐related products liability in “Product Quality Law”, stipulations concerning products liability can be traced to article 146 of the General principles of the Civil Law of the People’s Republic of China: “The law of the place where an infringing act is committed shall apply in handling compensation claims for any damage caused by the act.” Comparing with the legislation on Products liability in developed countries, these regulations are obviously over simple and lack of manipuility. It is time to make some improvement. According to the current law, the prevailing method for resolving products liability conflicts in China was to apply the law of the country in which the injury occurred (the lex loci delicti rule), without regarding to the content of that law. In this article, the author did some research and analyzed the deficiencies of the application of law system on products liability legislation in China by comparing with the similar provisions of some other countries and the Hague Convention. At the present time, the shortcomings of the relative laws in China are: a. Legislative structure is unreasonable and can not meet the real needs. b. The existing careless conflict rules and the undistributed legal norms make judicial practice into certain difficulties. c. The conflict rules are not scientific, rational and adaptative. Suggestions on how to resolve these problems are also provided in this paper. The author recommend that law‐makers in China should borrow ideas from foreign legislations and international conventions, absorb valuable experiences from them, and research how to make them work significantly in China’s specific circumstance. China should apply the doctrine of partition to regulate the rule of conflict. The author proposed a draft clause aiming at the choice of law rule on the international products liability in China that is to divide an international products liability case into “liability” and “damages”. Different rules of conflict should be applied to different parts.