Let me tell you about a European friend of mine in China. Well, he’s not really in China. Right now he’s in Thailand. Like many an expat, he went there for a quick holiday before the border closed and has been stuck for months because of virus travel restrictions. My friend desires anonymity. We’ll just
As a business lawyer who specializes in international transactions, I spend about half of my time working on legal strategy with my clients. I describe legal strategy as figuring out what the right way is to get from A to B, and those are often separated by international borders, vast oceans, and language and cultural
Many Chinese factories are hurting right now. Badly. This should come as no surprise. First they went through months of closures due to the coronavirus, and just when they opened they faced massively reduced demand. Chinese factories are closing left and right and many of those that are open are facing reduced demand and falling
On May 1, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announced it had issued a withhold release order (WRO) against hair products manufactured by a Xinjiang company called Hetian Haolin Hair Accessories Co. Ltd. (Haolin). The WRO was issued under the authority of 19 U.S.C. 1307, which prohibits importing merchandise produced by forced labor. To be
China manufacturing has gotten riskier and more difficult. Our China manufacturing lawyers hear this pretty much every single day from our own clients. On the one hand you have rapidly rising harassment of foreigners going on in China. Not a day goes by anymore without a long media story on the growing xenophobia in China.
The uncertainty surrounding products manufactured in China is causing many foreign companies (especially those that sell their products to the United States) to ask us what they can do to mitigate their risks and where else they could look for getting their products made. See Has Sourcing from China Become too Risky? Decisions about leaving
Earlier this week, in Moving Your Manufacturing From China: Look South (Again) to Mexico and Puerto Rico, I highlighted a recent New York Post editorial that decried America’s “serious over-reliance on China for pharmaceutical production”, and called for Puerto Rico to once again become a “central hub of U.S. drug manufacturing”. Then on the same
The party is over for an increasing number of U.S. companies who danced with China’s communist rulers. Their giddy, devil-may-care pursuit of the China Price has now devolved into the dystopia of “Uyghurs for sale”. See China’s Other Supply Chain Infection — Forced Labor. When someone finally listened to their complaints about IP theft, the
Yesterday, a long-term European client of ours asked me about the state of manufacturing in China. In response I asked him if he wanted the long or the short version. When he replied, “short,” my response was “really mixed, but overall really bad.” He then asked me to give him the short version how foreign
Yet again yesterday, the number of coronavirus cases and deaths reached a record number. In other words, the virus continues to spread ever faster and until it begins to slow down there is literally no end in sight. And yet, yesterday was also the day some Chinese factories were to open again for business. In
