The Cohesion Of Worker's Compensation System And Tort

At the turning of the century, people in China have been focusing more and more on the issues like occupational safety, safety of food and pharmaceuticals, environmental pollution. People are surrounded only by uncertainty and insecurity. We are now living in a"risk society". Ulrich Beck holds the opinion that risk is unpredictable, uncalculable, and unmanageable. In the context of risk society, there is no way to avoid risk completely, and it is impossible"to run away from machines and return to the fields". Thus, how to compensate the losses resulting from risks exist everywhere is an important topic.For industrial injuries, worker's compensation system and tort law are two major mechanisms to compensate the losses suffered by injured workers. From 19th century on, the externalization of culpability principles, the rise of liability insurance and social insurance have been nibbling away the territory once belonged only to tort law. Scholars call this"the crisis of tort". However, in nature, worker's compensation system and tort law have different functions and scope of application. The worker's compensation system in China is far from mature, it could be harmful to advocate blindly the superiority of worker's compensation while exclude tort law from compensating industrial injuries.For a long time, there have been heated debates as to the relationship of worker's compensation system and tort law in China. The very purpose of this article is to try to clarify the relationship between the two.