Evolving Compliance Challenges in China

Always a jurisdiction of concern, recent developments in China have companies on edge. But while the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act bar seems to grow exponentially, the community of U.S. lawyers with real expertise in China remains small. As such, last week’s gathering in Seattle of luminaries from China’s expat legal community was both rare and timely.

The conference, “Anticorruption Compliance in China: Current Enforcements and the Impact of Landmark Cases on Compliance,” was hosted at K&L Gates’ Seattle office. Amy Sommers, of the firm’s Shanghai office, emphasized that various dynamics are in play in recent developments in China enforcement actions. These include the primacy of the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership and its mandate to influence the priorities and direction of enforcement, both in official bribery and commercial bribery cases. The use of antimonopoly and anticorruption tools somewhat interchangeably to tackle distortive market behavior also is of interest to companies. A significant challenge for those multinationals subject to these trends is opacity, both structurally and in terms of interpreting the rules themselves (such as in the application of privacy rules).