The Establishment Of China's Tourism Law System Under GATS Framework

Tourism is praised as "Smokeless Industry" or "Everlasting SunriseIndustry". Since 1990s, tourism has developed rapidly, and already become oneof industries with the quickest momentum of development in the world. Tourismin China becomes more and more important in national economy. However,tourism law and regulations in China lag back where there are many problems tobe solved immediately, which do not match up with the rapid development. Ourcountry has been a member of WTO for seven years. GATS is a kind ofmultilateral document about international service and trade, in which theregulations of service, trade and tourism service are the grounds for its membercountries to formulate and carry out their own relative laws. As one of GATEsignatory countries, China should conform to the relative regulations of GATSfirstly, commit its promises in joining WTO actively, expand the openness andintegrate itself with international tourism. Whether or not China wouldcoordinate its tourism laws with those of GATS will be the key to whetherChinese tourism would make a sustained and sound development.The current developments of tourism in every country show that where there are no sound tourism laws or regulations, there are not orderly tourism markets, there tourism could not be guaranteed to make a healthy and orderly development. Although the State Council, National Tourism Administration, the local People's Congress at various levels, the local government and the local tourism administration have issued in succession some laws, legislations and documents to regulate tourism development, which managed the markets in some extent, China has not formulated a complete set of tourism laws and regulations until now. Thus in this circumstance the tourism market could not be regulated immediately and efficiently, and tourism could not be guaranteed to a sound development. Therefore, we should accelerate to build tourism laws and regulations, take national conditions as the basis, conform the relative rules of GATS, and use for reference the experience of other countries in legislation in order to build the tourism law system with tourism basic laws as lead, special laws as support, and local tourism laws and regulations as supplement, aimed at the problems in need of the pressing standard and solution.