On The System Of Chinese Mining Rights

Mining industry, a pillar industry of our national economy and an upstream one, which resource is scarcity and non-renewable, carries the special characteristics in its administration, which mainly involves the mining rights and the related system. The operating efficiency of mining industry and the public order should be based on the rationality and normalization of the mining rights operation. According to the present Chinese real law and mining rights system, the mining rights are defined as state-owned mining’s usufructuary right, which includes exploration right and mining right. Judging from the source of mining rights, it is mainly distributed in public laws, scarcely in the private law. In fact, in the field of theoretical research, the opinions on the legal attributes of Chinese mining right and right’s details have been controversial for years. In practice, the legal operating mechanism puts mining rights in an awkward position. This paper aims to point out the existing problems in mining rights operating with the current law, based on analyzing the actual cases, including misunderstanding to the legal attributes of Chinese mining right and right’s details, as well as the sharp contradiction between the public power and the private right. As the public power extends too far in this field, there must always be tensions between public and private laws. The intemperate and alienation of public power must cause a lot of conflicts in operation process. The author thinks, although the real right law and the mining law provide a basis for rights protection, the particularity and relativity of the mining rights still lack enough attention. Actually, an absolute denotation for the legal attributes of mining rights results in an unfavorable rights protection and administration. On the basis of analyzing the arguing views for legal attributes of the mining rights, the author declares his opinion, trying to have usufructuary right, ownership right and behavior right into the attributes of mining rights, and to regard the mining rights as a kind of compound rights---right bunch and also mention its sufficiency in content. Thus, the complete mining rights, being a right bunch, should involve the ownership of the minerals, exploration right and mining right and others as well. At last, with the discussion on present problems of mining rights system, the comparison of the foreign systems in this field and the explanations to this research achievement, the author tries to offer the way to improve the legal system designing for administration and mining rights protection. Hopefully, reference might be provided here for the efficient administration and continual development in this field by promoting the real law and mining law construction.