Guns, drugs and national treasures are all on a short list of high-value items that customs officials routinely prevent from leaving China's borders, but that expensive souvenir trinket with ivory inlay and hundreds of years of history may be less risky to take back home than the database on your laptop. China's cross-border data transfer laws have been notable recently both in their increasing numbers and the increasing nature of their protectionism, leading to heightened risks and draconian penalties for even seemingly mundane data sets and routine business practices.

The new age of the Internet initially brought promises of free, open and instant transfers of data at any time, anywhere in the world. However, as international governments and legal systems began to realize the ease with which private and confidential information can be stolen and shared through the Internet, some are doing what they can to impair the ability to transmit certain information with the laudable goal of protecting intellectual property rights and maintaining the security and privacy of confidential corporate information.

China stands out in its efforts to control the movement of information across its borders. First-time visitors to China can be shocked by the sudden lack of access to prevalent social media, Google Search and other popular platforms as well as prolonged outages of The New York Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal and other major news sources due to a system often jokingly referred to as the “Great Firewall of China.”