Study On Several Issues Of Chinese Consumers' Legal Protection

With economic and social development of our country in recent years, how to protect consumers' rights and interests has become a hot topic for people to discuss and study. As a consumer and a judicial worker concurrently, the author of this thesis tries to probe into several issues concerning legal protection of consumers and forwards some viewpoints in view of protecting the personal and even the whole consumers' rights and interests. Firstly, a consumer should be defined as one who purchases and uses commodity and receives service for non-productive consumption purpose concerning the legislative goal of the consumer protection law and international practice, and in such a way, the application scope of the Consumer Protection Law shall be extended. However, considering original legislative purpose of the Consumer Protection Law, a consumer must be the natural person, and in no case an organization or unit can act as the consumer. As for an organization that purchases commodity or service for its employees as welfare offer, the employees should claim the seller as consumers in case of any dispute or conflict involving quality issues of the commodity and/or service. Because of the consumers' weak status in a market deal and leading status in economic development, the legislation should break through the understanding of equal protection stipulated in the traditional civil law or commercial law, and offer special protection to consumers in the angle of economic law. This will conform to both target of fairness and target of efficiency. Secondly, fraudulent act should be stopped for the current protection of consumers' rights and interests. For such a purpose, we should correctly understand the provisions on punitive damage stipulated in the Consumer Protection Law. In the continental law system, the compensation for damage only refers to a simple compensatory civil law system, and its basic function is to compensate property loss of the victim(s) caused by any act of tort and act of breach arising from such act of tort and act of breach. Punitive damage has never been confirmed as a form of civil liability. In the Anglo-American law system, the punitive damage or damage with additional compensation, is frequently expressed as the negative evaluation of a court or jury on the defendant's malicious, barbarous or severe act of tort. The punitive damage stipulated in the Consumer Protection Law borrows the practice of the Anglo-American law, and it is a major breakthrough in civil legislation in our country, which stipulates more severe sanction on operator's fraudulent act. It should be firmly applied in protection of the consumers' rights and interests, under which circumstance, a consumer can claim the punitive damage if only there is any fraudulent act found in commodity or service provided by the operator. The range of damage claimed should include not only the consumers' property loss, but also the consumers' spiritual damage, and the amount of compensation for such damage should double the price of commodity purchased by the consumer, or the cost of service received by the consumer. Thirdly, for severely fraudulent act practiced by a realty developer in sales of commodity houses, consumers can claim the punitive damage; for any act of consumers claiming punitive damage as the matter of fact they buy a counterfeit commodity after they know that it is a counterfeit, the law should give assistance; for operator's promise to compensate ten to any one counterfeit found, consumers may claim punitive damage to the operator according to law if they have bought the counterfeit, and even claim for the ten times compensation according to agreement; for the operator's false advertising, if the description of related information on his commodity or service conforms to the terms of the offer stipulated in the Contract Law, then, if the consumer agrees the offer and signs the consumption contract with the operator as the offeree, then, he/she should have the right to cancel the consumption co...