5.
However, there are also very good reasons for proceeding ratner cautiously, especially as the current circumstances of judicial work within China are not very encouraging. A number of negative factors are identified in Perry Keller's confidential memorandum (10 August 1990) to the Political Advisor entitled Reciprocal Recognition and Enforcement of Civil Judgments in Hong Kong and the PRC but in fact dealing wick a much wider range of issues (ct. FCO telno 2406 at par. 2 which describes the paper as useful but "focussing entirely on civil judgments"). Among the most important of these considerations is the problem of judicial bias stemming from
okzvny Institutional and personal pressures on courts to protect the interests of their locality against Chinese parties from other districts as well as against foreign parties. Another manifestation of this sort of difficulty is referred to in the
Chinese legal press as "departmentalism' local branches of
lalye viyanizations are ordered by their leaders to resist the
enforcement of judgments. I have recently been involved in a case in London in which an action on a foreign judgment against the Cmimese pally, A national trading corporation, failed because the corporation produced documentary evidence purporting to show
that one of its provincial branches the judgment debtor
an independent legal person. There is very good reason to believe that this evidence was fabricated, although it was not possible to demonstrate this conclusively. As a result of
problems of this nature, the Supreme People's Court has observed that in civil and economic (that is, commercial) cases something like fifty per cent of all judgments cannot be enforced. The Chinese legal press from time to time carries accounts of court officials being beaten up in the course of attempting to enforce civil or economic judgments.
came as no surprise, therefore, when the PRC Ministry of Justice recently sent a delegation (headed by XU
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