On The Consular Protection Of The Rights And Interests Of Chinese Overseas Workers

Since the reform and opening up, China has undergone unprecedented changes, and contacted with other countries and the whole world more and more closely. Especcially, since the entry into WTO, China has developed the reaction with the world both widely and furtherly. Not only the Chinese government, but Chinese enterprises and citizens have palyed more and more important roles and become essential parts to the international development. In recent years, the number of Chinese overseas has increased dramatically, at the same time, more and more violated cases relevant to Chinese overseas have occurred, especially to the Chinese overseas workers, a vulnerable group.It has been a focus on infringement of Chinese overseas workers rights and interests. In reality, Chinese overseas workers have taken active measures to safeguard their legitimate rights and interests. However, due to the limitations of various factors, the problems Chinese overseas workers have to faced with can not be solved effectively, if they just rely on their own efforts. Under such a background, consular protection has played an essential role in the protection of Chinese overseas workers. However, currently China has to made much more efforts to improve its consular protection on oveseas workers. Therefore, how to improve the consular protection of overseas workers has been an urgent issue and also of considerable realistic significance.However, in the current academic researches, Chinese overseas have been the main research subjects as a whole, including Chinese overseas students and tourists, but Chinese overseas workers have been researched rarely and independently. Even though some researches are related to Chinese overseas workers, the perspectives are mostly on economics and labor service export, therefore researches on safety issues of Chinese overseas workers are still few, especially on consular protection.This article aims to study how to improve consular protection to safeguard the interests of Chinese overseas workers, consisting of three parts. In the first part, Chinese overseas workers’ current situation has been described through a large number of cases. And behind the infringement of overseas workers, the reasons must not be ignored, which could be summarized as the harsh working conditions, the lacking of responsibility and rights awareness and the loopholes of government management. Besides, Chinese overseas workers also choose to some ways to safeguard their rights. The second part gives the concept of consular protection, and summaries the achievements that China has made on consular protection of overseas workers, as well as analyzes the problems and shortcomings. In the third part, it introduces Philippines’ practice and achievements on how to ptotect overseas Filipino workers in detail. At the same time, learning from Philippines advanced experience, the article makes suggestions on how to improve the consular protection of Chinese overseas workers.