At the end of February 2019, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang signed a State Council decree announcing the “Industry Safety Accidents Emergency Regulations” which will come into effect on April 1st, 2019. The “Industry Safety Accident Emergency Regulations” (herein referred to as the Regulations) are based on the Safety Production Law and the Emergency Response Law. There is a code of conduct in the regulation for the production safety accident emergency work system, emergency preparedness, and emergency rescue.
Xie Yichang, head of the emergency management expert group of the State Council, said “the regulations also stipulate the legal responsibilities of local governments and production and operation units in emergency preparedness and emergency rescue situations.” She furthered that the “Regulations” represent a systematic norm for the national emergency response system to accidents of production safety, and provide legal support for comprehensively improving the level of emergency management work. In recent years, a large number of accidents have shown that the lack of any specific legal basis for the government during the accident response process, and the lack of corresponding legal norms in the emergency management of enterprises, have left a lacking emergency management of safety production in some regions.
The “Regulations” require that the emergency work system shall be uniformly led by the State Council, and the local people’s governments at or above the county level shall uniformly lead the production safety accident emergency work within their respective administrative regions.
