The Comparative Study Of The Responsibility For Product Quality Between China And Japan

With the modern scientific and industrial progress, people are getting into a timeof massive productions and consumptions. The producers take advantage of advancedskills and facilities to produce many different products with variety functions. On theother hand, the products get many people injured or suffer from the damage ofproperty. With the rising number of defect productions cases, more and more peoplefrom the theoretical and practical pay more attention on it, and the identify of theliability for product quality is the problem which we should to solve first, and it isalso the premise which decide if the consumers can be relieved.In China we started the researching of the responsibilities for product qualityquite late, although Tort liability law and Product quality law provided us the mainreference for the product liability, but the statements in these laws in some specificissues are too general and vague, and they usually provide us the opposite standardwhen we deal with similar cases. Meanwhile there are some contradictions andconflicts, which is not only likely to cause the difficulties in theory, but also in theapplication of the laws. Japan who is in the same law systems as we are, after20years of legislative exploration, in1994enacted the Product Liability Act finally.With nearly two decades of practical experience accumulated, Japan’s ProductLiability Act is a sound system, which has reached a quite mature state in theory andtrial practice, especially in the identity of defect, damage and the relationship betweencause and result. These are very important to affirm the responsibilities for productquality in China.This paper takes the angle from the case studies, comparative approach,combined with the function of tort law to analysis the differences in responsibility forproduct between Japan and China, and provides useful suggestions.This paper consists of three parts.The first chapter is the identification of product defect. It will use analysismethod, combined with the elements and standards of Japanese product defect casesto show the standard insufficiency in our country, under the situation in our country proposed add the elements of judging defect in the defects identification. Theunreasonable danger should be identified as the only standard to determine the defect.The second chapter is about damage identified. Though analyzing the theory anddamage of the scope to contrast between China and Japan, this paper tries to provethat Japan’s practice of compensation is reasonable. At last it puts forward ourcountry responsibility for product quality should compensate for the purely economiclost beyond the quality damage of products itself.The third chapter is about the cognizance of causality. It will compare withChina and Japan in theory and practice of the causal relationship to prove thatJapanese law theory is more reasonable. According to the jurisprudences recently inJapan, this paper suggests our country should separate the cognizance of causality andthe established condition of causality and causal relationship between damagecompensation ranges. Secondly, different rules should be used according to differentsituations; In addition, victims in many cases did not get salvations because theycould not prove the causal relationship. Consider to the balance among consumers,producers and sellers, it suggests in complicated cases we should use method ofcausal relationship properly to presume.