Recording & Review Pt. 8: “Same Life, Different Values”

Chinese tort law in practice has been sharply limited by the Supreme People's court which established a sharp differential between compensation for rural residents and urban residents.

China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDCR) released on April 12 its 2021 urbanization task list, which presses cities of less than 3 million residents to abolish hukou, etc., https://www.ndrc.gov.cn/xwdt/ztzl/xxczhjs/ghzc/202104/t20210412_1272133.html

But the National Peoples Congress and Supreme People's Court have also attended to this process.

 GWC

Recording & Review Pt. 8: “Same Life, Different Values”

Written by Dongyu Sun. Edited by Susan Finder and Changhao Wei.
This post also appears on the Supreme People’s Court Monitor.

Photo by ImagineChina, via Bloomberg News.

On December 15, 2005, a loaded truck rolled over on a mountain road in Chongqing, crushing a trishaw carrying He Yuan and her two friends to school. All three perished in the accident. What thrust this tragedy into the national spotlight, however, was the drastically different amounts of compensation their families received. The trucker’s employer settled with the families of Yuan’s friends for over 200,000 RMB each, but was willing to pay hers only 80,000 RMB—because she, unlike her classmates, had a rural hukou (or household registration).[1] The company cited a 2003 Supreme People’s Court (SPC) interpretation on the application of law in personal injury cases (2003 Interpretation), which created two separate standards for compensating the deaths of urban and rural residents.

As a result of this effectively hukou-based rule, countless victims’ families have found themselves in the same position as Yuan’s. The Chinese public has dubbed this phenomenon “same life, different values” [同命不同价] and has persistently criticized the 2003 Interpretation. Some citizens have requested that the NPC Standing Committee (NPCSC) conduct a constitutional review of the Interpretation.

It was not until 2020 that the NPCSC’s Legislative Affairs Commission publicly addressed these requests in its annual report on “recording and review” (R&R) [备案审查]. This report’s timing and content are significant. Below, we will first take a closer look at the 2003 Interpretation and the controversy surrounding hukou-based compensation standards, before returning to the Commission’s report.

The SPC’s 2003 Interpretation

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