As one of the government tasks to straighten out economic orders this year, the anti-monopoly has become a focus arresting the attention of the people.
According to statistics by China Consumers Association, most complaints lodged in 2000 were against the monopolized industries. The number of complaints against the post services reached 31,797 times, or 32.3 percent of the service sectors, with most of them being directed to telecom service quality and increased charges. Other monopolized industries on water, electricity, and gas also faced strong criticism due to their random charges.
As early as last October the State Administration for Industry and Commerce pointed out that it is necessary to make and enforce laws against restriction on competition in the dominant monopoly industries, such as electricity, insurance, railways, posts and commercial banks.
At the beginning of this year officials from the Economic Restructuring Office of the State Council said that the key issues in the reform and regrouping of monopolized industries lay in severing the government functions from enterprise management, strengthening competition mechanism, innovating enterprise system for the realization of scaled businesses. Except for sectors concerning national security, natural resources, production of a few public products and public services, all the other monopolized industries and departments should by way of reform create an open platform for competition. And the reforms to come would be riveted on electricity, railways, civil aviation, post and other industries.
Encouraged by the government's anti-monopoly signal, somebody stepped forward to sue the railway ministry. In the meanwhile Beijing's telecom departments invited doubts from raising fees without holding hearings.
Gao Debu, an economy expert from the Renmin University, holds that there is still a long and bumpy way for China to go in for anti-monopoly campaign, lying in the government's determination.
However, Hu Angang from Chinese Academy of Sciences says the serious headache lies in electricity monopoly in both terms of scale and impact on consumers' benefits, adding that random charges in the trade reached 2.74bn yuan (US$0.33 billion), even more than that grabbed in telecom industry.
Supported by the planning economy system for a long time, the telecom, electricity industries have grown rapidly and gradually formed monopolies. Invested by central or local governments, these monopoly enterprises inevitably bear a deep hue of administration, since the government plays all roles as policy-maker, supervisor and business conductor. These are the barriers on the way for making anti-monopoly laws and can not be solved at a go. Therefore, the anti-monopoly drive has turned out a thorny problem to tackle with.
More international enterprises will come into the Chinese market along with the setting up of a market economy and the coming WTO membership. So it is extremely urgent for China to enact anti-monopoly laws in order to confront the fiercer market competition and cater to the internal demand for economic globalization.
(People's Daily 07/09/2001)
