Coal Resources In Shanxi Integration Of Legal Issues

As China's major coal producing province, Shanxi's prominent role of being the country's important energy base cannot be changed in the near future. We know that mineral resource is a type of non-renewable reserve. As the backbone of the infrastructural industries, mineral resource is key to the development of society and national economy. It is the essential and fundamental element to the human subsistence, economic growth and societal development whereas coal resource is among its most important class. While Shanxi has rich coal reserve, its long existed extensive development approach of having many poorly regulated small-scale coal mines scattered around has shackled the development of its coal industry. China's rapid economic development has progressively driven up the demand for coal while many managerial and development issues such as environmental protection and production health and safety concern in the coal industry have arisen. The dilemma that Shanxi's coal industry is facing to a large extent characterizes the problems of the whole country's coal industry. To cater for the need of China's economic development and Shanxi's own coal industry's sustainable growth, the resource integration of Shanxi's coal industry is predestined.In 2009, Shanxi's coal industry resource integration procedure has triggered wide scale controversy in the society. The lack of clarity in its law policy contributes to part of the storm while people's diverging view on the outcome of the integration as a result of its pioneering nature also accounts for the controversy.This paper digs into the legal analysis from various perspectives such as property law, administrative law and constitutional law, contributes the writer's own suggestion towards completing the relevant legal policy for the coal industry's resource integration procedure and attempts to solve the related problems occurred during the integration process. Comparative analysis, legal interpretation and empirical analysis approaches are applied in this paper.The rest of the paper is structured as follows. The first section addresses the motivation of the paper. It starts with the introduction of the progress of Shanxi's coal industry integration procedure, moves onto depicting the problems encountered during the process and finishes by introducing innovative area of the paper. The second section illustrates the research content and methodology. The research content illustrates the overall structure while the methodology involves comparative analysis, legal interpretation and empirical analysis methods. Chapter I explains Shanxi's coal industry integration procedure and societal response. It first introduces the background of Shanxi's coal industry resource integration's proposal, lays out the main content of the proposal and its anticipated goals and finishes by summarizing various response from the society regarding the integration procedure. Chapter II contains the research of the property law and focuses on the related theories of mining right. It then explores the theoretical righteousness of the"the valuation and compensation of mining rights of Shanxi province"and gives the writer's own understanding. Chapter III looks into the coal industry resource integration and state monopoly issues. This chapter first challenges the righteousness of industrial state monopoly and then contrasts the foreign attitude towards the state monopoly in the coal industry. Chapter IV portrays the"nationalization"tendency of the coal industry resource integration. It first clarifies the difference between"nationalization"and"state holding"and then analyzed into the various factors that contributed to the"nationalization"tendency of the coal industry resource integration. Chapter V explains how to improve China's coal industrial resource integration. It contains three parts: first, how to qualitatively define the legal nature of China's resource integration procedure; second, the potential legal consequences of the coal industry resource integration; finally, analysis of potential legal measures which may improve the coal industry resource integration procedure. Chapter V contains the innovative contribution of this paper. As the legal theory is yet to be completed for the pioneering coal industry resource integration, the writer seeks to contribute towards the legal integrity of the resource integration procedure.