A lot is happening these days in and with China and around the world. Obviously.
Much of our law firm’s legal work has lately been focused on helping clients deal with a China that is internally fracturing and slowly but surely decoupling from the rest of the world. Our international lawyers have been consumed with helping companies (and NGOs and even countries) figure out how best to deal with a more political China, gyrating costs, with patches of lingering product shortages, and with factories closing — temporarily and permanently due to China’s declining economy. Our newest most common call is from clients wanting to move their manufacturing to Mexico/Thailand/Vietnam/India “as quickly as possible,” which almost never is quickly at all.
Our social media pages reflect all this, oftentimes with a much stronger and more cutting edge perspective than this blog, where we are at constant risk of the great firewall and where our focus is much more on the practical aspects of dealing with China than with politics. On our social media, you will see a more controversy, and more individualism as between our various lawyer-writers. There we can let loose and fully express ourselves. And we do.
Without a doubt, the two biggest issues most companies that do business in or with China are facing these days is whether to stay or go and/or whether to continue having their products manufactured in China or to diversify their production elsewhere. Many of our clients are “splitting the difference” by setting up and/or growing their businesses in China, but doing it more than ever with trusted locals instead of with expats. For various reasons, there has been a de facto cessation of “new” foreigners entering China. Nearly all so-called “China hands” left years ago and even many (most?) of those who went to China within the last 5-8 years have alreay left as well. I swear that the populations of Raleigh, North Carolina and Nashville, Tennessee must be made up of at least 50% ex-China people. So, for the immediate future, foreign companies have no choice in this.
Our law firm has done hardly any China company formations in years, but the number of deals where our client licenses its technology or brand name to China have at least tripled. Many of our clients are moving their manufacturing out of China, but most of those same clients have kept at least some of their manufacturing there.
The big issue remains diversification. China’s factories going dark during the peak of the coronavirus convinced foreign companies that manufacturing exclusively in China is too risky. This belief has intensified since Russia started its war against Ukraine. See Russia’s War Will Impact Your China Business. The growing fear that China will invade Taiwan and China’s constantly “dissappearing” Chines CEOs and foreign personnel are also big factors in the foreign company exodus from China.
Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter (or X, as Elon Musk and about a dozen other people now call it) give us a greater ability to speak freely. The below is a quick update and listing of what we are doing these days outside of this blog.
HB Blog/Canna Law Blog. In addition to this blog, we have two other blogs that frequently cover international law issues as well — and sometimes even China issues also. These are our HB Blog, which has become somewhat of a catch-all for international and other blog posts that are less relevant to our China Law Blog readers, and the Canna Law Blog, which focuses on cannabis law, hemp law, CBD law. Though the Canna Law Blog for the most part focuses on domestic U.S. law issues, it frequently posts on international (hemp, cbd, cannabis, and psychedelics) issues as well, and those international posts often garner the most readers. And here’s a little confession: the Canna Law Blog consistently gets anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 more readers each month than this blog. Just to give you an indication of how important that blog is, I attended a leading legal blogging conference and two of the speakers highlighted that blog as THE best example of a blog that has become incredibly well-known in addition to the law firm that writes it. That blog has won just about every prestigious blog award possible and I would guess its readership surpasses that of just about every other legal blog out there. I have no way of proving it, but until someone proves me wrong I will persist in believing that our international cannabis lawyers have been involved in more international cannabis transactions than any other law firm and our international trade law team has handled more international trade and customs matters involving cannabis than any other. Our Canna Law Blog Facebook page has approximately 165,000 followers!
Harris Sliwoski YouTube. Our Harris Sliwoski YouTube Channel is used mostly to provide people with free and easy access to our various webinars. I promise you will not be disappointed.
LinkedIn. We have a thriving China Law Blog Group on LinkedIn that serves as a spam-free forum for China information, networking, and discussion. This group is always growing and totals more than 13,000 members, and we are one of the few China groups on Linkedin that is growing, not shrinking.
The members of our China Law Blog LinkedIn group are fairly evenly split between those who live and work and do business in China and those who do business with China from the United States, Australia, Canada, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and other countries in Asia. Some are international lawyers and some are China lawyers, but most are businesspeople and some are academics (students or professors). We have senior level personnel (attorneys and executives) from large, medium, and small companies and tons of mid-level and junior personnel as well.
What truly separates us from most (all?) of the other LinkedIn China groups is that we remove anything that smacks of spam or is not relevant for those doing business with or in China. Our hewing to such a tight line on what we permit means we do not get a large volume of postings, but this also means we do not waste people’s time on drivel or business pitches. If you want to learn more about doing business in China or with China, if you want to discuss China law or business, or if you want to network with others doing China law or business, I urge you to join our China Law Blog Group on LinkedIn.
My personal LinkedIn page has nearly 13,000 followers and that has led me to post more often there on all things China. I welcome new followers and new connections, though I warn you that I tend to be slow in responding to connection requests. I promise not to overwhelm you with posts: I post maybe once or twice a week.
My colleague Jonathan Bench is extremely active on LinkedIn and mainly discusses China business, international business, and blockchain. He has a growing Web3 Law group on LinkedIn.
Ngosong Fonkem, Robert Kossick, and Adams Lee are also experts on international trade-related issues. Ngosong focuses on trade compliance. He regularly presents in the U.S. and abroad on trade-related topics, sharing news of his speaking events on LinkedIn. Robert uses LinkedIn to discuss compliance and enforcement issues, as well as IPR. Adams mainly discusses China business on LinkedIn.
Shannon Brandao is the founder of China Boss newsfeed on LinkedIn, which has nearly 25,000 followers! She is internationally regarded as a China expert, particularly on China trade and political risks. She uses LinkedIn to discuss her research on China-related business and geopolitical trends, as well as new ways of understanding China. I cannot recommend her feed highly enough.
Akshat Divatia and Jack Scrantom use LinkedIn to share their insight on immigration policies and practices. I encourage you to follow Akshat here and Jack here.
Facebook. Our China Law Blog Facebook page is thriving as well, with nearly 25,000 followers (this is its number of “likes”). We use Facebook to post interesting, important and entertaining articles about China. Posts there get a lot of comments and discussion, often heated. We tend to be very open and opinionated and free-wheeling there. With so much going on with China and Hong Kong these days, our Facebook page has become a key source. I urge you to go there and “like” us so you can benefit from what we are doing there.
Twitter. I am also now posting a fair amount on Twitter at @danharris. I left Twitter for many years but I am now happy to be back as I enjoy the sheer immediacy of it. I most definitely do not hold back there but I also post on non-China things from time to time. I have more than 20,000 followers there, and that number keeps rising despite Twitter’s own travails. I also urge you to check out and follow Fred Rocafort from my firm as well, (@RocafortFred). Until recently, Fred spent much of his life in Hong Kong and in Mainland China and his tweets (oftentimes in both English and Spanish) do a great job of bridging the various gaps between HK, the PRC and the West. In addition to posting on China and Hong Kong, Fred also often posts about Latin America. Jonathan Bench (@jonathan_bench), who spent around five years living in China and now splits his time between Seattle and Salt Lake City, is also a frequent poster on Twitter about all things China, all things international business, and all things Web3, and I urge you to follow him too. We also have a China Law Blog feed, @chinalawblog and it would be great if you were to follow that too.
We also have Twitter accounts in Spanish (@HarrisBrickenES, a/k/a Harris Sliwoski en Español). That account is mostly run by Fred Rocafort and Arlo Kipfer, both of whom are fluent in Chinese, Spanish, and English and — as you might imagine, are spending increasing amounts of their time working with companies that are moving their production/investments from China to Latin America or to Spain, both for Chinese and for American/European/Asian companies.
As some of you have noticed (and written us about), we have been “streamlining” our blog. This mostly consists of us combining posts into what we have taken to calling “super-posts,” in an effort to make the information we put on here even more accessible and helpful. Please let us know what you think.
And please join us on social media so we can continue engaging with you online in discussions about China and the world.
