Legal Study On The Market Access System Of China’s Exhibition Industry

In recent years, our exhibition industry, as a newly emerging third industry, haswitnessed a prosperous development. The gross exhibition space of our exhibitionbuildings are listed as the second largest in the world. The number of exhibitions haveincreased consistently, with58international exhibitions certified by the organizationof UFI. However, overall, there are still some problems existing in our exhibitionindustry, such as wasting exhibition resourses, holding exhibitions with similarthemes, competing in a negative way, having low level of marketization, etc. whichhas seriously prevented our exhibition industry from moving towards large scale,marketization, industrialization, and internationalization. In1997, the General Officeof the State Council issued the Circular on Strengthening the Administration ofHolding Foreign and Technological Exhibitions within the Territory of China. This isthe first and the only administrative laws and regulations on regulating our exhibitionindustry, establishing the market access system of our international exhibitions, thatis both the qualifications of organizers and the contents of exhibitions must beexamined and approved by the competent departments. After that, the NationalBureau of Administration for Commerce and Industries issued the Measures onAdministrating Domestic Commodity Exhibitions, which established the marketaccess system of our domestic exhibitions, that is the qualifications of holding unitsand the contents of exhibitions must be examined and registered by the competentdepartments. The characteristics of exhibition industry itself determine the necessityof administrating the market access of exhibitions. But due to many flaws of thecurrent legal system of market access of our exhibition industry, it fails to regulate the above-mentioned problems in an effective way. Therefore, this thesis aims toimproving this legal system by summarizing the existing loopholes of our marketaccess system of exhibition industry and learning from the countries with prosperousexhibition industries.The thesis comprises four chapters.The first chapter introduces the basic theory of market access system of theexhibition industry. The first section compares the differences and finds out theconnections among the concepts of exhibition industry, MICEE industry andexhibition. The second section summarizes the characteristics of exhibition industryand the current situations of our exhibition industry. The last section defines thecontents of market access system of exhibition industry and analyze the values of thislegal system.The second chapter focuses on the analysis of our current market access systemof exhibition industry. This legal system mainly includes three specific market accesssystems, stipulating the following matters respectively:(1) the qualifications andprocedures for organizers and co-organizers to enter into the exhibition industry;(2)the procedures of examining and approving the contents of exhibitions;(3) theestablishment of the regulatory institutions in terms of market access. Each section inthis chapter points out the flaws of every specific market access system and analyzehow these flaws result in the existing problems of our exhibition industry.The third chapter introduces the market access system of three countries withprosperous exhibition industry. These three countries are Germany, France andSingapore. This aims to draw useful experience from the construction of their marketaccess system of exhibition industry.The last chapter gives suggestions to the improvement of our current marketaccess system of exhibition industry. The first section requires that the governmentdepartments should be aware of their roles and positions in the exhibition industry.The second section analyze how to innovate the regulatory methods of our marketaccess system of exhibition industry. The third section explicits the functions ofgovernment departments and exhibition associations and manage to reconstructure thesystem for them to coordinate to effectively regulate the market access of exhibitionindustry.