Study On Residential Earthquake Insurance Contract In China

China is located in the Pacific Rim—Himalaya seismic belt, hasgrave natural disasters in the word, especially earthquake which activesfrequently and brings huge losses. The direct economic losses caused bythe Wenchuan earthquake of2008reaches into845.1billion RMB. Thesudden earthquake poses a great threat to people’s life and health and theproperty security, impacts seriously on social stability and economicsustainable development.As a kind of natural disasters, earthquake’s occurrence isindependent of man’s will. Facing the enormous damage caused by theearthquake, the important thing is making scientific and accurateprediction. The more important thing is how to reduce the loss, to rebuildthe residents’ homes and to return to normal life rapidly. From therecords of the post-disaster reconstruction in China we could find that mostly economy compensation relies on government financial assistanceand social donations, as well as the personal saving. Only a few peoplehave the awareness of risk to buy insurance to cover losses and getcompensation. Having the functions of economic compensation andsocial management the insurance system has many advantages that thegovernment financial assistance and social donations do not have. As arisk sharing mechanism, Insurance is a good method to handle theunexpected risks and natural disasters，aims to transfer the huge risk tomore insured and ultimately to improve the ability to deal with risk.Insurance contract is the carrier that connects the interests of eachpolicyholder. Insurance company compensates the policyholders for theloss agreed in the contract. Insurance companies have raised lots of longduration, high stability in the capital, and invest in the capital market toprovide the construction funds for the development of economy.Insurance is the most basic and effective mean of modern social risk management, playing a more and more important role in social andeconomic life, become a kind of system which conductive social securityand stability. Insurance has the functions of management of social risks,reducing people’s economic disputes, improving the social security andmaintaining social stability.Housing is people’s living place, and in the traditional Chinese viewis far more than living place, is a place to maintain family spiritualsustenance. Residential earthquake insurance contract plays an importantrole in the system of earthquake insurance, acts as abridge between thepolicyholders and the insurance company. But now our country has nospecial laws and regulations to regulate the residential earthquakeinsurance contract in practice. Lack of legal protection system ofearthquake insurance, we could find a lot of problems in residentialearthquake insurance. This paper aims to compare and learn from the countries withadvanced experience of earthquake insurance system. Throughcomparing and analyzing, we could establish the system of contract ofresidential earthquake insurance with China’s specific nationalconditions.At present, there still exist many problems in the system of China’searthquake insurance contract, for example: lack of legal regulation,indefinite coverage. Based on the analysis of the above problems and theadvanced experiences of other countries, this paper puts forward the ideaof building China’s residential earthquake insurance contract system.