On The Perfection Of China's Emergency Legal System

Public crisis management covers various aspects. The construction and perfection of the emergency legal system is an important constitutes part of it. The modern legal system construction started relatively late in China. The construction of emergency legal system in crisis management was not mature till 1990's. Saw 2007 November, the promulgation of Law Of Dealing With Emergent Events placed government's crisis response in the framework of the guarantee of law system. But there are no latest research results in academic circles about how to further perfect the construction of emergency legal system after the implement of this Law. In the meantime, the current research about emergency preplan, emergency mechanism and emergency system ("one plan and three mechanism" are core of our country's crisis management), which are indivisible by emergency legal systems, is not enough thorough. Concerning emergency legal system construction, current probe on many problems involving legal systems and mechanisms still have a long way to go. This text will try to find out the real reasons for these problems: the negligence of crisis prevention in crisis management; the absence of professional organization of national crisis management; and the absence of National Emergency Act which should be the leading law of all emergency laws.This text will first introduce the basic academic frame of emergency law: defining concepts of crisis, crisis management, emergent events and emergency legal system. Afterwards, the international experiences of the construction of emergency legal system will be given. Then, the author views the history of the evolution of new china's emergency legal systems which may be divided into 4 periods: the beginning period(1949-1989); the developing period (1989-2003); the lawmaking period (2003-2007); and the period of ruling by law (2007- ).The promulgation of Law Of Dealing With Emergent Events servers an important symbol that the construction of China's emergency legal system has been strengthened. But there are still many challenges we must face: the deficiency of emergency preplan, the deficiency of emergency law and the absence of the professional organization of national crisis management. The above shortcomings have produced a series of problems such as some public crisis can't be regulated by current emergency law, the responsibility of government sections isn't clear in crisis response, and the linkage of dealing with crisis is sluggish and the civil society in excluded in the process of confronting crisis. The above mentioned deep-level can be understood in the aspects as follows: the current assessment mode of government performance results in the tendency that crisis prevention has been neglected; secondly, the interests conflicts in government sections made impossible setting up the crisis management organization, and thirdly, Chinese government is too powerful in crisis management for long time to constitute an National Emergency Act. To further perfect China's emergency legal system, this paper will discuss the thesis from 3 aspects: the emergency law, related organization system and the combining social strength. In the first place, the perfection of emergency law includes standardization of all levels emergency preplan in general and National Emergency Act in particular. As the latter has the core position in emergency legal system, it should be promulgated as soon as possible. In the second place, to perfect of related organization system, China should constitute state-level full-time organization of public crisis organization and changing the current assessment mode of government performance. Finally, the perfection of social strength involves changing the traditional way of confronting all kinds of crisis only by means of depending on government itself. Drawing lessons on experiences of international emergency legal system, this text will use actual case to discuss the practical questions about the promulgation of National Emergency Act, changing the index of performance evaluation, establishment of professional organization of crisis management in national level and so on.