Personal Bankruptcy Coming to China

The English-language press has discovered a long-gestating project to introduce personal bankruptcy law in China. The project is described as "China's first personal bankruptcy law," though it remains just a draft for now, and it is strictly limited to longtime residents of Shenzhen, in the special economic zone just north of Hong Kong. If it's a success, something like this law may be rolled out across the country, as the CCP Central Committee (meeting at the 3rd session of the 13th National People's Congress a few weeks ago) explicitly announced its intention to "promote individual bankruptcy legislation" (see item 8, first paragraph). As far as the suggestion that this has been prompted in any sense by the COVID-19 pandemic, lawyers in Shenzhen have been working on this project since at least 2014, and they released a book-length discussion of this project in 2016. And as far as the characterization of this being "the first" such draft law, another extremely thoughtful and impressive draft law was released a few weeks ago by a group of bankruptcy scholars associated with the Research Center for Personal Bankruptcy Law of Beijing Foreign Studies University (coordinated by the amazingly energetic and dedicated Prof. Liu Jing). Meanwhile, courts in several southern coastal cities have been undertaking their own experiments with dealing with debt collection cases involving insolvent debtors. So ... BIG things have been underway in China on this topic for some time now. Stay tuned for more details on these interesting developments (I'm working on a couple of articles on developments in small business bankruptcy in the Arab world and in China this summer and fall ...).