china law blog

China Mergers and Acquisitions: When Your Due Diligence Says Don’t Do It

My law firm’s international lawyers do a significant amount of transactional work, which we call “happy law.” It’s generally happy because the buyer and seller largely know what they want from the other side and they have already agreed in principle on what the deal will look like. Both sides bring in transactional lawyers like

China Employee Handbook Lawyer

How to Whip Your China Employee Handbook into Shape

If it has been a while (say over a year or longer) since you reviewed and updated your China employer rules and regulations, you should get on it now. Creating employer rules and regulations (a/k/a an employee handbook) takes a fair amount of hard work, but once you have a well-written handbook, updating it should

China trademark registration lawyer

China Employment Contracts: Do Them in Chinese

Don’t waste your money with an English language employment contract Our China lawyers sometimes get “simple” questions from our WFOE clients regarding China’s labor law. One such question is whether they must use Chinese as the prevailing language for their employment contracts with their employees, especially with their expat employees. This question is not as

Part time employees in China

China Expat Pay: Splitting with Hong Kong is Illegal and Dangerous

As China steps up its tax enforcement against both foreign companies and foreigners, we are seeing increasing instances where expat employees working in China are having their salaries “split” by their Chinese or foreign company employers. We strongly counsel our employer clients against doing this sort of salary splitting and we even more strongly counsel

manufacturing red flags

China Expat Employment Contracts: Red Flags

As part of our China employment work, our China employment lawyers are often tasked with helping expats navigate the China employee onboarding process, including reviewing and revising their employment-related documents, such as employment contracts. This involves our making sure our clients’ contracts protect their interests and achieve their goals and minimize the likelihood of confusion

Chinese company due diligence Seal or Chop

Is That A Real Chinese Company Chop/Stamp/Seal?

How to determine the validity of the China company chop/stamp/seal that will be going on your China contract and why this matters. What exactly is a China company chop? How to distinguish a fake company chop from a real one.

china law blog

Beware of China Lawyers

Yesterday I attended a USPTO webinar, How the U.S. government can help companies protect and enforce their IP in China. It was informative and I highly encourage anyone interested in IP protection in China to attend future webinars. Moreover, it brought back memories of my own stint in the government helping American companies protect their

International IP lawyer

China Employee Dispatch and IP Protection

China places many restrictions on hiring employees using employee dispatch companies (a/k/a third party hiring agencies) and there are a number of legal issues foreign companies that go this route should consider, and IP is one of them. Normally, the way this system works is the foreign company and the employee dispatch company sign a

cybersecurity

China Cybersecurity: No Place to Hide

Contents of this Article: I. Cybersecurity with Chinese Characteristics: The Party is the leader of everything. II. China’s Comprehensive Network Security Program III. China’s Regulatory System: The Multi-Level Protection Scheme (MLPS 2.0) IV. Cryptography is not a solution. V. A Concrete Example: The Golden Tax Malware Program  VI. How Companies are Pushed into an Insecure

China contracts

China Distribution Agreements: The Additional Questions We Ask

In China Distribution Contracts: The Questions We Ask, we wrote about some of the initial questions we ask our clients for whom we are drafting China distribution contracts. That post started out discussing how forming and then operating a China WFOE is difficult and expensive — see Forming a China WFOE: Ten Things To Consider