Liu Hua Delivered a Speech on Legal Construction of Shanghai FTA

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Written By Regina Rao. December 28, 2013.

On the evening of Dec. 27th, 2013, Liu Hua, the director of the Shanghai government legislative affairs office, delivered an inspiring and significant speech about the legal construction of Shanghai Free Trade Area (FTA) to SHUFE Law students. Law School Dean Zheng Shaohua hosted the lecture and showed a warm welcome to her and invited her to take part into the SHUFE Law school legal research work on Shanghai FTA.

The content of the lecture is separated into four parts. Liu firstly gave a detailed process of the FTA setting up. FTA idea started from the Premier Li’s inspection to Shanghai at the beginning of this year and Shanghai which is the Chinese financial center is the natural experiment site for FTA. This experiment gave Shanghai both more development opportunities and big pressures. Before the idea of setting up FTA, Shanghai already has bonded area in Waigaoqiao. However, bonded area is different from FTA from many aspects so it is still a new challenging task to build a FTA in Shanghai. Secondly, Liu focused on the two main legal difficulties that FTA setting up would meet and the solutions. The first difficulty is that how to solve the conflicts between requirement of the FTA reform and opening up policies and the country’s existing law and regulations. She made several examples like the easier and more convenient procedure of the approval of foreign capital, the open market of cultural relics auction and so on. And the second difficulty is that how to solve autonomy right problem of the FTA experiment area management regulation. Law always lags and can’t keep up with the progress of reform and opening up in society.

Insisting on the existing law will miss the reform opportunity. FTA wants the authorization of enacting the laws and regulations by the NPC in trial and in temporary. It will become the exception of the law enact process in the future. Nowadays, existing laws are unable to meet the needs of reform and opening up. The reform of administrative approval is urgent.

After that, Liu told students about the documents have made to guarantee the legal system. Municipal government has made out one piece of regulation and five documents which are mostly the specific rules of foreign-invested enterprises setting up and foreign investment. National ministries and commissions including CBRC, CSRC, China Insurance Regulatory Commission and others have issued ten documents at the same time. At last, she illustrated some ideas about the legal construction of FTA in the future.

At the end of lecture, she showed thanks to the support and contribution for the FTA legal research of SHUFE Law School and was willing to cooperate with SHUFE Law to complete the legal construction in the future. Dean Zheng also thanked Director Liu and expressed the wish for next cooperation opportunity.

Published：2013-12-28 Hit：725