Judicial Reform in China and Its Impact on Foreign Investment (Excerpts)

• Author: Dan Harris - Steve Dickinson

The PRC State Council Information Office just published a White Paper on Judicial Reform in China. The purpose of the White Paper is to provide a snapshot view of the progress of legal reform in China over the past ten years. Readers who are interested in the current state of the Chinese legal system and the projection of future trends should take a look. Even for those who do not fully agree with the assessment will benefit by seeing what the top level of the Chinese government believes is important about China’s legal system and its future development.

Four issues raised in the White Paper are of particular interest to foreign investors in China:

1. The number of lawyers and lawsuits is rapidly increasing. This is contrary to what many foreign investors believe and the implications of this must be understood. The White Paper provides the following basic statistics:

• There are currently 18,200 law firms in China, up 31.6% from 2000
• There are 210,000 lawyers registered in China.
• In 2011, Chinese lawyers acted as counselors for 392,000 clients, up 24.6% from 2008.
• Chinese lawyers handled 2.315 million litigation cases in 2011, up 17.7% from 2008.

The White Paper does not mention that the number of judges in China has remained static at about 200,000 over this same period. This has meant an increasing workload for the judges and has negatively affected the quality of decisions. Nonetheless, Chinese people are still making active use of the court system to resolve disputes.

Most foreign business people are unaware of the large amount of litigation that occurs in China and tend to believe that they will never be sued. They therefore do not prepare for lawsuits and, when sued, they do not take the matter seriously and often do not respond promptly and effectively. This is a mistake. As the numbers above show, there are a lot of lawyers in China and they make their money suing people. When a dispute arises, the likelihood of being sued in China is actually quite high. Far higher for example than in Japan or in Korea.

2. China has made major progress in the administration of civil justice.

The improvements fall into four areas:

1) The functions of case filing, trial and execution have been clearly separated. The major change here is in the substantial improvements in executing on judgments. Though this may sound like a purely technical issue, it actually has important practical consequences for foreign companies doing business. Criticisms of the Chinese...