Regulation On The Restrictive Competition Behaviors Of China UnionPay In Accordance With The Anti-Monopoly Law

As the Only bank card association in China, the China UnionPay is a joint-stock financial institution established by more than80domestic financial institutions, on the premise of the approvement of the State Council and the People’s Bank of China. It play the role of transferring trading information, liquidating funds between the various banking systems, and promoting the development of China’s banking card industry.But in recent years, it implemented a lot of restrictive competition behaviors with it’s monopoly position, which aroused the concern of the community. How to regulate the behaviors become a urgent subject.It was established under the special historical background, it’s business scope and business purpose have significant administrative colors. From the terms of the form, it belongs to an independent legal body with a profit-making. So it’s status is unclear, it is really impossible to exercise two functions in place. This is also one of the factors that it implemented the behaviors.With the development of natural monopoly theory, the CUP has not a natural monopoly. Although from the background and purposes, it was belong to policy monopoly, but it no longer constitutes a policy monopoly now. Then it can’t be applied with exceptional system, and should be subject to the Anti-Monopoly Law. The perse rule and the rule of reason is the two major rule of analing the illegality of the restrictive competition behaviors. As the bank card market in two-way and the complexity of the behaviors, the rule of reason is more reasonable in the judicial process.The CUP implemented a number of the behaviors with its monopoly position, this article have a detailed statement of several typical events, and then analied and identified the type of the behaviors with the antimonopoly theory, these types are the administrative monopoly behavior, the abuse of dominant market position and the monopoly agreements.There are many deficiencies of investigation procedures and liability provisions in China’s Anti-Monopoly Law. It is not conducive to regulate the behaviors. Therefore, it need to improve investigation procedures, such as setting up an independent enforcement agencies, the informants right to information and reporting incentives, at the same time improve the legal liability, such as introducing the United States three times damages system in the civil liability, increasing penalties in administrative liability, introducing the penalty in criminal liability.