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Tag: Administrative Enforcement

Shaming the Untrustworthy and Paths to Relief in China’s Social Credit System

24. April 2023
A new paper by Marianne von Blomberg and Haixu Yu
Media outlets and government websites use cartoons to explain SCS practises

Much has been said and written about China’s Social Credit System (SCS). Stories about an almighty, high-tech surveillance dictatorship that rates its citizens are persistent in global media discourse while the image of an omnipresent and omnipotent social credit score already found its way into memes. An increasing number of observers debunk the horror stories with facts and point to the low-tech nature of most SCS projects. As unfounded as many social credit stories are, they have also fuelled a long-overdue debate outside of China about data protection and the power of assessments. In a proposal for an AI regulation, the European Union cast the imagined “social credit scoring” as antagonist.

Meanwhile, the social credit stories and their policy responses abroad overshadow the actual innovations and challenges that the SCS brings to governance in China. The SCS does not have the capacity to function as the Orwellian surveillance tool it is often depicted as, but that does not mean that it is less ambitious and transformative. Zooming in on one of the multiple innovations that emerge under the SCS’s overarching aim to engineer trust, we studied the architecture behind the systematic disclosure of information on the “untrustworthy” (失信人) and, in a second part, interrogate paths to relief for targeted subjects. Those who find themselves shamed as “untrustworthy” are almost exclusively persons who have violated laws and regulations or not fulfilled court orders, rather than persons who have breached unspecified moral norms, and consist overwhelmingly of companies rather than individuals. The SCS’s shaming practices are thus best contextualized within public regulation work. Our study finds that the SCS formalizes and elevates a concept of public regulation that is best conceptualized as reputational regulation to new prominence. Shaming as a regulatory tool is not new and has been applied by state agencies globally. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration of the USA for example routinely uses its Twitter account to shame companies that violated work safety rules. However, the SCS is the first central-level government strategy that systematically implements shaming schemes in all regulatory realms from transport to food safety and equips the practice with a clear rhetorical framework. Public disclosure of compliance assessments is also a common practice in emerging, transnational ESG regimes (Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance). The driving factors of both, the SCS’s reputational regulation scheme and global ESG regimes are similar: The aim to enforce norms of public interest in the absence of an efficient and comprehensive regulatory infrastructure.

We first identify three pillars of successful reputational regulation through a review of empirical and theoretical literature on reputational regulation and then point out how the SCS realizes them.

(1) In reputational regulation, the declared purpose of the information disclosure is to punish, rather than to increase government transparency or warn of dangers (e.g., from poisoned food products). The NDRC and PBoC stipulate blacklisting and the public sharing of information on trust-breaking in their 2022 list of SCS disciplinary measures. Both sanctions are reputational only, as the more tangible punishments that come with blacklisting, such as restrictions on market access and subsidies, are listed separately. Further, a plethora of core structural policies document the punitive purpose of disclosure, for instance the foundational Planning Outline on the Construction of a Social Credit System (2014-2020) calling to “give rein to the role of the masses in appraisal, discussion, criticism, and reports, shape social deterrence through social moral condemnation, and censure trust-breaking acts.”

(2) To ensure that the public and media generate the negative publicity necessary to pressure target subjects to change, a government agency engaging in reputational regulation needs to provoke this disapproval by embedding the disclosure within a moral message. The SCS endowed the existing disclosure strategy of dual publicity (双公示), which initially promoted disclosure of administrative punishment decisions to foster government transparency, with the trust-breaking rhetoric, making it part of the SCS toolkit. Negative social credit information technically consists merely of violations of laws and regulations and is not novel. The innovation brought by the SCS is to relabel selected categories of administrative information as “credit/trust information” and publicize them as such. To information recipients, the impression conveyed is that a violator of the law in one realm is overall untrustworthy. The trust rhetoric dominates all publication formats: Blacklists and disclosure platforms carry titles such as “seriously untrustworthy companies”.

(3) Finally, reputational regulation requires that the information must be brought to the attention of actors who are in a position to exert pressure on the deviator. A variety of dissemination channels amplified by a state-dominated media environment ensure that information on trust-breakers reaches far. Apart from online platforms and local government websites, public billboards, announcements at local festivities, television and radio broadcast, ringtone announcements and various apps inform about who has been designated untrustworthy. Credit service agencies also tap into social credit information.

To summarize, the SCS drives a type of information disclosure that is intended more to punish than to warn, comes with a negative moral message, and is disseminated to the public through various channels. Regulatory shaming is, however, notorious for infringing on target subjects’ rights. Chinese literature has described the publication of negative social credit information as a new type of reputational punishment (声誉罚). The agency loses control over the scope and intensity of punishment once information is published because the punitive action itself is carried out by others. Even if a target subject successfully objects to the publication of adverse information and the agency takes it down, the reputational damage can hardly be undone. The second part of our study discusses how targets of reputational punishment under the SCS can seek legal remedy.

There are three potential paths to relief for those adversely affected by SCS-driven regulatory shaming in China: administrative reconsideration (行政复议) and litigation, internal agency controls, and the SCS’s own mechanism of credit repair (信用修复). The prior two paths may provide more or less satisfying outcomes for conventional administrative penalties such as fines, in the case of shaming however, revoking the agency’s act means only ceasing publication. Reproductions of the negative information concerned in news outlets and other channels remain in place. Additional remedies such as apologies and compensation payments appear necessary but while the Administrative Litigation Law provides for such remedies, we could not find court decisions ordering such remedial measures in social credit-related cases.

Where subjects believe to be unlawfully designated “untrustworthy” and bring the claim to court, they frequently face the following issues:

Whom to sue?
  • It is often unclear which agency is to sue because a single SCS penalty can involve multiple state agencies. For example, a construction bureau in Jiangsu blacklisted a company for not paying wages to migrant workers, resulting in a different local agency acting on the information by restricting the company from public bidding. When the company sued the construction bureau, the court held that the bureau was not the defendant. It held that the correct defendant was instead the other agency that had punished the company. In other cases, the agency that administered the blacklist was held to be the correct addressee. The confusion over the correct defendant in litigation may be further exacerbated by the trend to outsource shaming work to industry associations.
Are social credit penalties litigable?
  • If it was confirmed that social credit shaming measures constitute administrative punishment, the Administrative Punishment Law (APL) would apply, subjecting the shaming regulators to a series of procedures such as notifying targets beforehand and offering them a chance to defend themselves. Is SCS-driven regulatory shaming an administrative punishment? No legislation to date has clearly addressed this question. Courts regularly deny arguments that any SCS penalties, including shaming, constitute administrative punishment. Some claims have been accepted nevertheless with courts defining the SCS measure as an administrative act that has affected the plaintiff’s rights, and on this basis examined whether this act had the legal basis it needs according to law. A legal basis may consist of SCS regulations and measures issued by sectoral regulators from the ministry level down to that of local municipal agencies. In rather exceptional decisions, courts held that central-level policy documents that were not translated into local rules do not suffice as a legitimate legal basis for a social credit penalty.
Are social credit penalties subject to procedural restrictions?
  • A growing number of SCS policy documents stipulate procedures for social credit penalties, which increasingly find their way into local law where they can be invoked by courts. For instance, many local and sectoral regulations stipulate a duty on the part of the regulatory agency to notify a person before entering her on a blacklist. The Jingyang District Court of Deyang City ordered an agency to delete a negative record because the agency failed to “inform the administrative counterpart of the administrative decision to be made and listen to the administrative counterpart’s statement and defence.”
Just information disclosure or a reputational penalty?
  • In most instances, remedies for social credit penalties are denied because social credit measures pose conceptual novelties to adjudicators. In particular, the courts have invoked the accessory nature of publication, the necessity for government transparency, and the political priority of SCS building to reject plaintiffs’ claims. For Tianheng Investment Construction Management Ltd. from Hangzhou for example, appearing on a list of untrustworthy companies for having submitted forged materials meant the de facto end of its business, at least for the stipulated publication period of twenty-four months. However, the courts of all three instances denied the company’s claim that the disclosure was punitive, holding instead that publication was part of the agency’s duty to objectively record and publicize their decisions. In other cases, the SCS goals of building a trustworthy society and market have been invoked by adjudicators to legitimize credit information recording, scoring, and publication practices. Lianfa Construction & Engineering Ltd. had won an initial case against a local housing agency which had, without legal basis, imposed a social credit penalty. However, the court of appeal overturned the ruling, insisting that the mechanism for disciplining law-violating and trust-breaking behaviour must be perfected. As Peking University Professor Chun Peng points out, in the larger mission of SCS building, courts are not just the guardians of lawful conduct of state agencies but also “vanguards of disciplinary measures for trust-breaking”.

Litigation does little to alleviate the damages ensuing from undue shaming for trust-breakers. The clumsiness of shaming measures and their irreversibility render them hardly controllable through the judiciary. Alternatively, control mechanisms within the information handling agency may prevent undue damages. Only the ability to object prior to publication can provide an effective safeguard against wrongful shaming sanctions, and agency rules on social credit information lay down the procedures that lead to publication. However, no solution to effectively overseeing such procedural rules in the absence of judicial review has surfaced.

Finally, where target subjects admit guilt, they may obtain relief from shaming through the reintegrative path of credit repair. Credit is repaired and respective negative information publication halted if subjects correct untrustworthy conduct and eliminate negative impact, make credit commitments, participate in charitable activities, and/or undergo educational training, depending on the relevant sectoral and local credit repair mechanism. Credit repair is not strictly a remedial path as it does not operate on the premise of agency mistakes and in practice remains porous. However, with credit repair’s concept to function as a reintegrative path comes an innovation that has the potential to resolve the irreversibility of shaming: In some credit repair programs, instead of deleting the original negative record, that record is supplemented by a record of repair clearly explaining the reason for the repair and the final assessment.

Reputational regulation remains a work in progress. But is it effective? Other than traditional enforcement tools of state agencies such as fines, reputational regulation requires the cooperation of non-state actors, in this case, the shaming community which has to act upon disclosed information and exert pressure on the shamed subject. Initial studies found that company representatives across China believe reputational harm from negative publicity to be one of the key concerns with regard to the SCS. However, more research is needed to assess under which circumstances and to whom the disclosure of information on trust-breaking is relevant.

Marianne and Haixu’s paper is published with Modern China, a draft version is available at SSRN.

Marianne von Blomberg is a Research Associate at Bern University of Applied Sciences, Institute for Global Management, and is currently completing a PhD with Cologne University’s Chair for Chinese Legal Culture and Zhejiang University’s Guanghua Law School. Her research revolves around social credit regimes in China and beyond, assessment-based public regulation, and data governance. In her dissertation, she explores how the Social Credit System project in China strengthens, weakens, and transforms the law. She holds an LL.M in Chinese Law from Zhejiang University and a BA in Communication, Culture and Management from Zeppelin University. She can be contacted via Twitter @mariannehuashan or email at m.vonblomberg[at]uni-koeln.de.

Haixu Yu is a Research Associate and doctoral student of the Chair of Chinese Legal Culture. He passed the national judicial examination of the People’s Republic of China in 2014. His research interests include Chinese judicial reform and Chinese public law. Before studying in the University of Cologne, Haixu Yu graduated from the Chinese University of Political Science and Law in 2018, where he received LL.M degree, majoring in Chinese economic law and fiscal law. He received his LL.B. and B.A. degree in 2015 also at China University of Political Science and Law.

General Administrative Enforcement, Reputational Regulation, Social Credit System

Merger Control with Chinese Characteristics?

28. December 2022
A paper by Alexandr Svetlicinii
The headquarters of Tencent Holdings, which has seen several attempted mergers blocked by antitrust regulators in recent years. Photo by laboratoriolinux

Besides its significant role in international trade and investment flows as an economic powerhouse, China has also become an important jurisdiction in terms of competition law enforcement. While application of the Anti-Monopoly Law (AML) to commercial activities of domestic companies has important repercussions for their market conduct abroad, the enforcement of merger control directly affects multinational companies, which, due to their business presence in China, have to notify their mergers and acquisitions for clearance by China’s competition authorities.

Like numerous other jurisdictions, China applies its merger control to those transactions by multinational companies where the parties have substantial business presence on the Chinese markets expressed in terms of the realized turnover. It embraces the “effects doctrine”, meaning that it applies merger control extraterritorially “to monopolistic conducts outside the territory of the People’s Republic of China, which serve to eliminate or restrict competition on the domestic market of China.” As a result, even a merger of two foreign companies would have to obtain clearance from the Chinese competition authorities provided the turnover-based notification thresholds are reached.

In competition law scholarship, the narrative is strong that China’s merger control converges with that in Western jurisdictions, as it, too, applies economic analysis as a core basis for merger review and enhances procedural safeguards to protect the rights of the merging parties, increasing legal certainty of merger assessment. The Chinese merger control authorities have been frequently labelled as “young,” “unexperienced” or lacking necessary human resources to achieve a more technocratic enforcement of merger control rules. Despite the intentional choices of China’s legislators and regulators to design and implement its merger control regime with “Chinese characteristics”, Western academic literature is abound with hopes for further international convergence.

One of these “Chinese characteristics” was the initial distribution of the AML enforcement competences among three institutions: the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM), and the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC). This distribution of AML enforcement powers renders China’s competition law system unique as in most jurisdictions, competition enforcement powers are entrusted to a single competition authority. The NDRC was authorized to enforce the AML against price-related anti-competitive practices, SAIC was responsible for prosecuting non-price-related infringements, while MOFCOM assumed the responsibility for merger control. Despite its extensive expertise on matters related to international trade and foreign investment, MOFCOM had considerably less knowledge and experience with the functioning of the Chinese domestic markets, compared to the other two anti-monopoly enforcement authorities. MOFCOM was relieved of its responsibility for enforcing merger control under the AML in 2018, when the State Council moved to centralize AML enforcement under a single institutional roof by establishing the State Administration of Market Regulation (SAMR). The Anti-Monopoly Bureau of the MOFCOM subsequently moved to SAMR. Finally, in 2021, China separated its competition authority into an independent Anti-Monopoly Bureau (AMB) that was elevated from the rank of a department within SAMR to a deputy ministerial-level agency. The AMB fully absorbed the merger control department of the SAMR.

While national competition authorities in many jurisdictions have to ensure that their merger decisions contain sufficient reasoning in order to allow for a meaningful judicial review, that is not the case in China. Practitioners frequently note the lack of transparency on the part of the MOFCOM and consider the published decisions of little instructive value for the legal and business strategies of the merging parties. The lack of clarity appears intentional since it increases the de facto discretion of the competition authorities in identifying their concerns and encourages merging parties to engage in negotiations to find the acceptable remedies. Furthermore, unlike other areas of AML enforcement, courts have virtually not played a role in clarifying merger control concepts. As a result, the interpretation of merger rules has been entirely in the hands of the enforcement authorities.

During 2008-2013, out of 750 notifications by AML enforcement agencies, only 57 (8%) concerned transactions involving exclusively domestic companies. This led to the impression that China’s competition authorities intentionally target foreign companies in their merger review. However, instead of focusing on whether China’s merger control deliberately discriminates foreign firms, it would be more relevant to discuss how effective or relevant merger review is for domestic enterprises. One of the reasons for the absence of domestic-to-domestic mergers from the “problematic” cases where mergers were prohibited or cleared with conditions has to do with China’s market structures. In those markets where there is no monopolistic or dominant state-owned enterprise (SOE), the market shares of the parties tend to be rather small, concentration ratios are relatively low, and intended concentrations won’t have significant effects on competition. Due to their importance for the Chinese economy, although the consolidations of the Chinese SOEs were regarded as concentrations of undertakings and fell within the scope of merger control, once the government announces the reorganization of the relevant SOEs, the respective merger clearance of MOFCOM/SAMR remained a formality. While several high-profile SOE mergers passed the merger review, there are numerous instances where SOEs have omitted to submit their merger notifications and were fined with a penalty of up to CNY 500,000. This fine however is unlikely to serve as a sufficient deterrence. Therefore, although formally the merger control rules under the AML are applicable to foreign and domestic companies alike, the merger review was used more assertively in relation to foreign companies as such entities are not state-owned or regulated by means which the Chinese authorities normally use in relation to domestic market players.

Our study of China’s merger control enforcement is based primarily on conditional clearances and prohibition decisions since the AML does not require publication of unconditional clearances. Attempts to screen conditional merger decisions for factors that have been actually considered by MOFCOM/SAMR during the merger assessment process produced only anecdotal evidence. On the other hand, the formulation of merger remedies can serve as a litmus test for assessing the convergence, or lack thereof, between the Western-style, primarily economics-based merger control regimes and China’s sui generis merger control system.

It was widely noted that the most apparent divergence with Western jurisdictions consists in China’s competition authorities’ preference for behavioural remedies. Unlike the structural remedies that preserve market structures by separating certain business units from the control of the merging parties (mainly through divestitures), behavioural remedies allow the competition authorities to shape the specific commercial practices (price levels, sales volumes, market expansions, supply to certain customers, etc.) of the merging parties even after the merger is completed. Behavioural remedies (purely behavioural remedies) were imposed in 40% of cases and hybrid (structural and behavioural) remedies in 25% of cases. The maintenance of behavioural remedies represents a significant interference in the merging parties’ business activities.

For example, in the 2014 Microsoft/Nokia case, MOFCOM used behavioural remedies to ensure that the standard essential patents held by the merging parties would be licensed on FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) terms. The competition authority has justified its decision by the prevention of possible abuses of patents that may occur post-merger. In another 2014 case, Thermo Fisher/Lifei, the acquiring company was required to lower the China market list prices for its products in the next ten years and not to reduce the discount offered to Chinese customers. Another example of a behavioural remedy is the requirement to notify and ask for permission the competition authority in China about any further expansion of the merging parties’ business.

The present study of China’s merger control legislation and enforcement records demonstrates that while formally following the widely accepted competition harm theories, the significant discretion of the merger control authorities results in a limited degree of predictability in merger assessment. With regard to the nationality of the merging parties subjected to prohibitions or imposition of remedies, enforcement statistics suggest that China’s merger control enforcement is applied more assertively in relation to foreign companies.

The paper China’s Merger Control: Competition Assessment or Foreign Investment Screening? was published in the KLRI Journal of Law and Legislation. Alexandr Svetlicinii is Associate Professor at the University of Macau, Faculty of Law where he also serves as the Programme Coordinator of Master of Law in International Business Law. He is the author of the monograph Chinese State-Owned Enterprises and EU Merger Control.

General Administrative Enforcement, Anti-Monopoly Law, Antitrust Law, Chinese enterprises, Market Regulation, Mergers & Acquisitions

The Enforcement of Mandatory Rules against Illegal Contracts

24. June 2022
A new paper by Bingwan Xiong and Mateja Durovic
Lottery Kiosk at Xuzhou Station. Under Chinese law, lotteries are considered gambling and thus illegal -with two major exceptions: the China Welfare Lottery and the China Sports Lottery.
Photo by MNXANL licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.

In the past, Chinese courts tended to directly invalidate illegal contracts, thus possibly tolerate opportunistic behaviour sometimes. Article 52(5) of the 1999 Contract Law provides that a contract is void if it violates a mandatory rule prescribed by law or administrative regulation. Empirical research shows that by April 2014, in 355 of 453 cases concerning Article 52(5) of the Contract Law, the contract was ruled void.[1]

This practice underwent a change with the compilation of the Civil Code, where Chinese scholars sought to establish better coordination between the nature of private law and its attached public or regulatory facet. Building on a 2009 judicial interpretation that introduced a classification of mandatory rules, Article 153 of the new Civil Code stipulates a doctrine of defining mandatory rules with different levels of restrictions, with the aim of relieving the state’s restraint on the transition of economy. In result, a violation of mandatory rules may now render the contract involved void ab initio, voidable or still valid, depending on the significance of illegality defined by the law.

This change of jurisprudence successfully reversed the courts’ strong stance on the invalidation of contracts, giving them much more discretion in deciding the nature of mandatory rules and the effect on contracts. The reform also aligns the treatment of illegal contracts with the general trend in other jurisdictions. Nevertheless, we argue that across jurisdictions, this doctrine is merely targeted at the connotation of mandatory rules and the theoretical effects on contracts. Scholars and judges fail to equally emphasise the enforcement of the law against the contractors after upholding the validity of their illegal contracts. In other words, they end the debate within the realm of private law and simply assume that thereafter competent regulatory agencies would duly resolve the harm of illegality.

In our paper, we look into the case of the regulation of the lottery tickets sales on credit. As per Article 18 of China’s Lottery Regulation, no lottery may sell lottery tickets on open account or credit. Such a deed may result in imposed suspension, confiscation plus fines, and punishment on the person in charge as per Article 39. Armed with the new jurisprudence that not all kinds of illegality shall render contracts void and null, Chinese civil courts tend to uphold the validity of lottery sales on credit. Though this saves the innocent party from the loss because of the invalidation of the contract, the problem is, without the following actions of administrative organs, justice stops at the decision in court and the mandatory rules are not equipped with administrative enforcement power.

We find that the major obstacle is information asymmetry between courts and regulatory agencies: not only would the contracting parties not expose the illegal deal in fear of punishment or losing their interest. Also, the courts fail to actively transmit such information to the responsible departments, despite the Supreme People’s Court of China formally encouraging local courts to issue judicial proposals to regulatory agencies.

Empirical studies show that judges seldom issue judicial proposals about their cases to regulatory agencies due to their heavy workload, worries of engaging in improper judicial interference and a lack of rewarding incentives. As it encourages contracts and prevents opportunistic behaviour, we suggest to uphold the current jurisprudence about illegality, and further propose to establish a better systematic interplay among courts and regulatory agencies. This might be achieved through institutional reforms and technological solutions that help forward information of illegal transactions so it can serve the ultimate objective of enforcing the law.

[1] Ye Mingyi 叶名怡 (2015) Empirical Research of Invalidation of Illegal Contracts in China (我国违法合同无效制度的实证研究), Science of Law (法律科学) 6, 120.

This paper by Bingwan Xiong & Mateja Durovic The Enforcement of Mandatory Rules against Illegal Contracts was published in the Asia Pacific Law Review.

Bingwan Xiong is Associate Professor at School of Law, Renmin University of China. He is also Senior Research Fellow at Renmin University Center for Civil and Commercial Law. He obtained his PhD degree from Renmin University and LLM degree Harvard University. Email: bxiong@ruc.edu.cn.

Mateja Durovic is a Reader in Contract and Commercial Law, having joined The Dickson Poon School of Law in July 2017. Prior to joining King’s, he was Assistant Professor (2015‐2017) at the School of Law, City University of Hong Kong. He holds a PhD and LLM degrees from the European University Institute; LLM degree from the University of Cambridge; and an LLB degree from the University of Belgrade. Email: mateja.durovic@kcl.ac.uk

General Administrative Enforcement, Chinese courts, Civil Code, Contract Law, Illegal Contracts

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