There usually is one right way for businesses to act legally in China and if you are a foreign company, your best bet is to know and follow Chinese law. One of the problems businesses face in China is too many laws, some of which conflict with others. In Do Too Many Rules Erode the
The Matt Schivenza blog has a new post, Foreign Woman Removes Top At Beach in Qingdao, Causes Major Disturbance. [link no longer exists]. Matt’s post tracks what I was talking about this morning with a client: not nudity, but rule of law, and how foreigners that do business in China often misunderstand misperceive what China
If one of our clients owes money to a Chinese company and it cannot pay all its creditors, our international dispute resolution lawyers recommend they pay the Chinese company last because the Chinese company will likely never sue to recover. I am NOT advocating not paying debts to Chinese creditors, but I am saying that
Comparing Korea and China Lawyers A post like this has to generalize a bit, and there are exceptions to everything I say below. However, having worked with dozens of law firms in both Korea and China, I have noticed the following four problems when dealing with lawyers from these two countries: KOREA LAWYERS 1.Non-responsiveness is
The internet is abuzz with news that Chris Devonshire-Ellis of China Briefing may have influenced movement in the Yuan-Dollar conversion rate by what is being described by Chinese governmental authorities as a “pure fabrication.” To summarize, China Briefing Magazine did a post claiming to have interviewed a Chinese governmental official who talked of the Yuan
Depositions in China You are a litigator preparing a case in the United States. Your case is in the discovery phase and you want to depose a key witness located in Mainland. This witness is either unable or unwilling to come to the United States, and so their deposition must be taken in China. How
The Real Cost of Cheap Labor I once ended up on the same Qingdao-Seoul-Seattle flight as a long-time client whose company had been hugely successful in China in an industry where just about every other foreign company had failed. The long flights gave us a great opportunity to talk about business in China. He told
“I hear that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.” Bob Dylan, Man of Peace “I am a man of peace.” Kwai Chang Caine, Kung Fu, Episode 8 “Peace lies not in the world…but in the man who walks the path.” Master Po, Kung Fu, Episode 8 When I took on this task of
This month’s China Economic Review contains an article Steve Dickinson on the Danone Wahaha dispute. The article is an offshoot of a speech he gave for JP Morgan on China Joint Ventures. Steve’s China Economic Review article is entitled Danone v. Wahaha: The lessons to be learned from the tensions within China’s largest beverage joint
Our advice to companies that do any business with China (including those that merely have their products made in China) is to register their trademarks in China before they go there. China is a first to register country, which means that whoever registers a trademark first gets it. I repeat: in China, whoever registers a
