We Americans do not like foreign governments or their agents meddling in our domestic affairs, whether it is China, Russia, Iran, Syria, or some less reprehensible regime. We do not even like friendly foreign governments meddling in our affairs. I am not talking about traditional CIA/007 spies or agents who operate in the shadows, mainly
Our China lawyers are often asked to explain the relationship between Hong Kong and China. When I would get asked this, I would usually start by telling American clients to think of Hong Kong’s relationship to China as being similar to New York’s relationship to China. For our European clients I would use London or
This isn’t the first time I’ve written on the China Law Blog about the California Consumer Privacy Act (or “CCPA”), California’s massive new privacy law that many compare to EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (or “GDPR”), but it’s certainly becoming more important now as CCPA takes effect in about six weeks. If you weren’t taking CCPA seriously
This blog has not minced words when it comes to describing the grim situation in Hong Kong, which, as one of my former colleagues at the State Department puts it, “will get worse before it doesn’t get better.” Signs of Hong Kong’s demise as an international business center are plentiful. The city is in recession.
Since October 6, 2018, one of our recurring themes has been that China has become far more difficult for foreign companies. It is what we have been calling the New Normal. This New Normal extends to all foreign companies that do business in or with China, but it has hit U.S. and Canadian companies particularly
“It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.” Bob Dylan, from Not Dark Yet In the 1990s, I represented a number of international fishing and timber and mining companies that did business with Russia. This was not so long after the fall of the Soviet Union and there were a bunch of large Russian companies
In China Factories Are Exporting Lower Prices Around the World, Bloomberg News wrote this week about something our internmational manufacturing lawyers have been seeing: Desperate Chinese factories are lowering their prices. Are all Chinese factories desperate? Absolutely not. Are all Chinese factories lowering their prices? Near as we can tell, a great many are, especially
In China’s New Cybersecurity Program: NO Place to Hide and again in China’s New Cybersecurity System: There is NO Place to Hide we wrote how China’s new “cybersecurity” laws give the Chinese government and its prized companies full and total access to all data and IP held by foreign companies. Yesterday, in China’s New Cryptography Law: Still No Place to
The PRC National People’s Congress on October 26 enacted the long awaited Encryption Law (密码法）, which will come into effect on January 1, 2020. The official text of the law can be found here and an English language summary can be found here: The Law is another piece of the comprehensive cybersecurity system China is rolling
As regular readers of this blog know, we are very much down on Hong Kong as an international business center. See Hong Kong for International Business: Stick a Fork in It (August 13) and Hong Kong for International Business: Stick a Fork in It, Part 2 (October 22). We have seen and we believe we
