A Legal Analysis on Government's Liability for Safety Incidents in China

The article mainly analyzes three cases in which local Chinese governments advanced damages to the victims in handling the aftermath of safety incidents. The three cases represent three different situations and problems which are subject to different frameworks for deciding government liability. In regulatory failure cases, although the absence of regulations or the ill-made policy contributes to the occurrence of the safety incident, state bears no liability because Chinese Administrative Procedural Law denies any claims arising out of abstract administrative act. In enforcement failure cases, the government shall bear liability according to its degree of fault. In situations where the government has no fault in the occurrence of the safety incident, government's payment to the victim is out of pure political or humanistic concern instead of legal concern, which amounts to passing the loss to innocent tax-payers. Further study should focus on streamlining the relationship between the state liability and civil liability in safety incidents cases, and new rules that enable the government who had advanced payment to victims to exercise recourse right against other tortfeasor(s) need to be devised.