A Comparative Analysis Of The Protection Of Consumers' Rights And Interests In China And Japan

Difficulty of financing is the dilemma many entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized enterprises face with. When an entrepreneur has a good innovation and also has the capacity to complete this idea, such as design a new product, but entrepreneur may face with two problems: the first is that entrepreneur is not sure whether consumer is willing to buy this product or not, the second is that entrepreneur has no sufficient funds to produce these products. Pre-sale crowdfunding provides good solution for the two problems. Entrepreneur can display their ideas in the pre-sale crowdfunding platform, set up fixed financing time and objective, design stable returns and achieve goals of testing, promoting, interacting, collecting funds, decreasing risk and testing market through platform.Currently, pre-sale crowdfunding business gains rapiddevelopment across the whole nation. The number of successful funding projects and the amount of funds are going up. Up to May 31 st 2015, 4 pre-sale crowdfunding platforms including Jingdong Crowdfunding and Taobao Crowdfunding have collected 356.39 million Yuan and had 647 successful crowdfunding projects. With the gradual development of crowdfunding industry, various kinds of supervising policies gradually launch. In 2015, the increased platform obviously slowed down, and crowdfunding industry has stepped into a relatively stable development trend. Development scope and market share data show that the concentration ratio of the entire industry is gradually improving. Taking Jingdong Crowdfunding for instance, since Jingdong developed pre-sale crowdfunding business in July 1st 2014, it has successfully collected 1.21915 billion Yuan in about one and half years, among which the highest single funding sum was more than 72 million Yuan, the highest single supporting people was 359 thousand. In the global scope, particularly in China, pre-sale crowdfunding industry is now in rapid development stage by counting on the tide of internet finance.But, our country has no definite laws and legislation on the emerging pre-sale crowdfunding, so the pre-sale crowdfunding also brings series of risks damaging consumer’s rights in the development process. This paper tries to start from the summarization, legal nature, situations of damaging consumer’s rights and corresponding countermeasures of pre-sale crowdfunding, takes references from Japan’s legislation experience and provides suggestion on improving pre-sale crowdfunding.Chapter One introduces categories of crowdfunding, concept, characteristics and operating procedures of pre-sale crowdfunding, and analyzes legal nature of pre-sale crowdfunding from the core of pre-sale crowdfunding, which is the brokerage contract relationship contained in pre-sale consumer contract and pre-sale crowdfunding. Chapter Two analyzes situations of damaging consumer’s rights in pre-sale crowdfunding transaction from three aspects of before, during and after pre-sale crowdfunding procedure, and demonstrates relevant cases and reports to as proof. Chapter Three introduces applicable laws and relevant regulations on pre-sale crowdfunding in our country, compares to analyze relevant laws and regulations such Japan’s Funds Settlement Law and illustrates China’s and Japan’s system and content on protecting consumer’s rights in pre-sale crowdfunding, particularly Japan’s. Latter part of Chapter Three proposes personal opinions on improving consumer’s rights protection in pre-sale crowdfunding from before, during and after three aspects.