China Law Blog

Technomic Asia's Chinese Business Podcast interviewed CLB's own Steve Dickinson the other day and we now have a transcript of that interview. Click here to go to Technomic Asia if you want to listen, rather than read. It is rather long, so we will be breaking it out into parts, based mostly on the subject matter. This first part deals with the evolution of Chinese law, in general. The interviewer is Kent Kedl, who heads up Technomic Asia's Shanghai office.

Technomic Asia provides a nice introduction of Steve's background, as follows:

In today’s episode of the China Business Podcast, I sit down for a discussion with Steve Dickinson of the China Law Blog, one of the best blogs on the Web.

Steve is an American lawyer living in Shanghai. Over the last ten years Steve has taught law (in Chinese) off and on at Beijing University School of Law. He frequently lectures on Chinese law topics in the United States and on American law topics in China, and he is the author of the Chinese corporate law section of Matthew Bender’s International Corporate Law. Steve works for Harris & Moure, a law firm with which Technomic Asia has worked on a number of China projects.

Steve is completely fluent in Mandarin Chinese and nearly fluent in Japanese. He can also read Sanskrit and Tibetan and speaks a bit of Korean, as well. He managed to find spare time to chat with me — in English — about intellectual property concerns and other hot topics in China business and law.

On to the interview:

Kent: Welcome back to the China Business Podcast, glad you could join us today I’ve got a special guest with us today, I get tired of writing my own stuff, so, I’m going to be lazy this time, I’ve got Steve Dickinson who is a lawyer with Harris & Moure, a Seattle based firm, but Steve is based here in Shanghai. I’ve done some work with Steve, and hoisted many a beer with him as well, so it’s good to have you with us.

Steve: It’s a pleasure to be here.

Kent: I would like to just open it up and just talk in general about law in China, the role of lawyers, your perspective on things. One of the things I appreciate about working with you is you do not pull punches, you do not edit yourself and I like that. Generally speaking, what is the difference between law here in China versus, lets just say, the US?

Steve: There are a couple of ways to answer that question. The first thing is that law is new to china. Law is a very old thing that people are pretty used to in the US. In china there was nothing that we would really call law, in the sense of rules that normal people, business people paid attention to in their daily conduct, until about six years ago. It’s that recent. The first thing about law in China is it’s a very recent phenomenon. It’s new to judges, to business people working with the law; it’s new to the lawyers who are doing the law. So, that’s the first thing. One thing people need to pay attention to-- things have changed in the past 6 years. Law in terms of normal law, in terms of basic contracts, trademark registration, sort of the basic guts of the law, the way we do it in the United States is now a very real part of Chinese business life. That wasn’t true even 10 years ago. Now it really is true. The Chinese business people and everyday people are perfectly happy to grab a lawyer and sue somebody, which isn’t true of Japan and Korea. Japan and Korea, haven’t changed very much, law isn’t a very major part of people’s lives there. China is sort of halfway between the Japan attitude and US attitudes. People are perfectly happy to grab a lawyer and file a law suit here.

Kent: Americans, we have exported our litigious society?

Steve: It really is surprising, when you look at the way law is conducted in China, maybe it’s my fault. In the 90s, there wasn’t a lot of law here, so I ran a program where I trained Chinese lawyers and judges and prosecutors on the American legal system. China has looked to the west, and in particular to the US for how to run its legal system, and it really has gone away from the attitudes of Japan and Korea, which were very fearful of common people using the law, and much more to the American or European approach to the law. That’s the second thing about law here people need to understand. A lot of Americans get fooled by the law in China and find it strange, but a lot of the things they find strange are because the Chinese legal system is based primarily on a German continental model. So many of the things that are unusual about the way Chinese law works are not because of anything unique China did but because they are using a German approach, not an American approach. And that can have big effects- for example, in intellectual property law. In the United States, a trademark goes to the first person to use the mark, whereas in China the trademark goes to the first person to register the mark and use doesn’t make any difference. Some Americans are just horrified by that and they think it’s a Chinese special characteristic, but actually it’s the way all the continental civil law systems use trademarks. So people can get quite fooled by it.

Part II will be on the lawyers' role in China business transactions.