Looking Ahead: Issues in China's Telecommunications Law

By Arjun Subrahmanyan

Perhaps in no area of China's fast-growing economy is the government more sensitive about foreign investment than in telecommunications. The Chinese authorities have always sought to use foreign investment in ways that, while beneficial to national economic growth, also preserves the social order. The rapid development of communications technology forms a new and unprecedented challenge to efforts to control access to information while at the same time satisfying the country's keen demand for and interest in modern technology.

In many ways, the effort to fashion laws regulating telecommunications is unique to the particular industries and technologies involved. In one way, however, the industry is akin to many others: crucial legislation is either lacking entirely or remains incomplete. Anti-monopoly law, bankruptcy and foreign trade law are other areas in which comprehensive national legislation has been eagerly awaited for years. A law for contracts, the basis of commercial relations through enumeration of a precise set of terms for enforcement of duties and obligations between parties, was not introduced until 1999, about 20 years after the onset of market-oriented reforms in China.