Contract Laws of the People's Republic of China
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Description
The ‘Open Policy’ announced by the People’s Republic of China (the ‘PRC’) in the spring of 1978 brought with it a resurgence of Chinese interest in legislation, for both domestic and international purposes. The past decade has witnessed a remarkable law-making effort by the PRC, much of it focused upon contracts and contract-related activity. This book presents English-language translations of the principal fruits of that effort in order to make it available, in one convenient volume, to a broad audience of foreign business people, lawyers, government officials and scholars. The book also provides two introductory essays. The first seeks to place contract legislation in the context of the PRC’s developing legal system and its effort to create a legal environment congenial to foreign business. The second discusses some practical problems that frequently arise in the negotiation of business contracts with China. Following presentation of the legislative material, the third section of the book reproduces some PRD sample contract forms that often constitute the basis for the Chinese side’s negotiation drafts. The reader should be cautioned that the English-language counterparts to the Chinese-language provisions in these forms will need careful review to confirm the accuracy of the translations. With the exception of a few provisions that make no sense, we reproduce the original forms, rather than corrected versions, because that is what foreign negotiators will confront, and to revise each of the forms as we would like would eliminate a good deal of each form. A final section offers a Chinese-English glossary indicating the English equivalents used in our translations. Contracts are protean and play a key role in every economic sphere. Thus, a wide range of Chinese laws and regulations concerning property, finance, companies and other topics refer to contracts related to their subject matter. Because of space limitations, it is not possible to include all such legislation in this volume. The accumulation of PRC legislation on each such topic is becoming so substantial that individual specialized volumes are warranted. Similarly, it is not possible to include all the relevant local legislation, which has been springing up—to use a Chinese metaphor—‘like bamboo shoots after rain.’ The translations in this book are principally the work of my colleagues Ms Yvonne Chan and Mr Ho Yuk Ming, who in many cases have built upon earlier draft translations by my learned partner Ms Jamie P Horsley and other lawyers in the firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. Several of the translations were originally prepared by attorneys in our firm and published in volumes I, II and III of China’s Foreign Economic Legislation, and we are grateful to the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing for permission to include refined versions of them here.
Publication Date
1988
Recommended Citation
Cohen, Jerome A.; Chan, Yvonne Y.F.; and Ming, Ho Yuk, "Contract Laws of the People's Republic of China" (1988). Faculty Books & Edited Works. 111.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-books-edited-works/111
