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Xinlu Liang

China’s new draft law on combating cross-border corruption is as much a weapon against foreign interference as it is a tool against illicit financial flows, analysts say.
The draft sets out ways to block extraterritorial investigations and to retaliate against foreign anti-corruption enforcement, drawing a firm legal boundary against foreign jurisdictions while establishing its own mechanism to police overseas assets.
In doing so, legal specialists warn, Beijing is also creating a double-edged regulatory framework that will force multinationals and Chinese businesses operating in regional hubs such as Singapore to navigate data compliance dilemmas.
The draft Anti-Cross-Border Corruption Law was submitted to the country’s top legislature in late August for its first reading, and the public has until September 26 to give feedback.
During panel discussions about the legislation, lawmakers said the measures filled a crucial statutory void.
Wang Ke, a member of the National People’s Congress’ Standing Committee, said that in the past, provisions covering the area had been scattered across the Supervision Law and Criminal Procedure Law, complicating asset recovery and procedures for trials in absentia.
However, the new draft was a “fundamental law” that integrated prevention, punishment and international cooperation “into a single chain”, Legal Daily quoted Wang as saying on September 1.




The legislation will add another layer to the legal firewall that China has steadily erected over the past five years against perceived Western legal overreach.
Ryan Mitchell, an associate professor of law at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said “foreign-related factors in the fight against corruption are on the rise” and “the intertwining of domestic and overseas corruption is intensifying”, making the draft bill part of Beijing’s “overall push for intensifying ‘foreign-related rule of law’”.
“The rising globalisation of major Chinese firms makes cross-border corruption an ever more significant issue for Beijing. International perceptions regarding the fairness of Chinese competition, or the benefits of [Belt and Road Initiative] projects, are also tied to such genuine concerns,” Mitchell said.
The rising globalisation of major Chinese firms makes cross-border corruption an ever more significant issue for Beijing
Ryan Mitchell, law professor
To some extent, the draft law resembles some anti-corruption laws in the West, such as the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and Britain’s Bribery Act.
All three extend anti-corruption jurisdiction beyond domestic borders to target overseas bribery and cross-border commercial misconduct, and put corporate compliance programmes, internal accounting integrity, and third-party due diligence at the centre of enterprise liability and risk management.
However, the US act focuses on bribery of foreign public officials and accounting controls, while the British model establishes broadly framed bribery offences and a corporate failure-to-prevent offence, according to Wang Jiangyu, a law professor at City University of Hong Kong.
“The Chinese draft is much more institutionally and politically integrated,” he said.
The Chinese bill covers not only outbound bribery but also corruption involving Chinese public officials, state organs and state-owned enterprises (SOEs), overseas misconduct by Chinese public-sector actors, flight by suspected persons, cross-border transfers of corrupt assets, and certain foreign conduct producing effects in China.
“Beijing is borrowing some internationally recognisable elements of modern anti-bribery law, but embedding them in a distinctly Chinese model combining punishment, prevention, asset protection, supervisory governance, international cooperation and resistance to what China considers abusive foreign extraterritorial enforcement,” he said.
That Chinese model includes establishing a centralised mechanism led by the National Supervisory Commission, which comes under the Communist Party’s top anti-corruption body. The commission will coordinate with a dozen or so state bodies, ranging from public security and finance to cyberspace administration.
“This is important because cross-border corruption cases rarely involve bribery alone. They commonly require the tracing of payments, corporate records, beneficial interests, electronic data and overseas assets,” Wang said.
China’s decision to adopt a framework like the US act carries a touch of historical “irony”, according to Matthew Erie, an associate professor of law at the American University Washington College of Law.
Erie said that in 2011, then US Department of Commerce general counsel Cameron Kerry advocated for China to adopt a law equivalent to the American legislation.
Beijing responded by amending its Criminal Law that year to criminalise bribes paid to foreign officials, fulfilling its obligations under the United Nations Convention Against Corruption, he said.
But those statutory provisions remained dormant for over a decade until October 2023, when a court in the southern city of Guangzhou enforced them in a landmark case, convicting two former executives of state-owned China Railway Tunnel Group of bribing a government official in Singapore, Erie said.
It was a signal that China’s foreign bribery laws were being enforced.
What started out as a US effort to encourage trade has become a state-led push to resist Western legal dominance and American long-arm jurisdiction.
Behind Beijing’s legislative shift lies a decade of deep frustration with international legal cooperation. Before turning to a statutory extraterritorial framework, Beijing tried for years to combat cross-border corruption and repatriate fugitives through traditional bilateral diplomacy.
At its height, China negotiated 59 bilateral extradition treaties, believing that formal international agreements could serve as the legal backbone for anti-graft campaigns such as Operation Fox Hunt and Operation Sky Net, which were launched between 2014 and 2015 and continue today.
However, Western scepticism – which Chinese authorities view as an unreasonable double standard – blocked this bilateral framework from expanding where Beijing needed it most. Key Western destinations for fugitives, including the United States, Canada, Britain and Australia, either refused to negotiate bilateral extradition treaties with mainland China or left signed treaties unratified due to human rights and judicial concerns.
That left China with only around 45 active extradition treaties in force globally, mostly with non-Western nations.
This lack of an enforceable international framework turned Western capitals into safe havens for scores of high-profile fugitives well known for their corrupt activities.
Denied a functional multilateral repatriation pipeline, Beijing was left with little choice but to pivot to a statutory mechanism – creating what is, in effect, China’s own version of long-arm jurisdiction to police corrupt assets and actors overseas.
Now, Beijing appears to be summoning its full legislative powers to take a far tougher line than the US and Britain.
Mitchell said that both the US and British acts were widely regarded as being underused, with foreign officials seldom pursued and convicted of bribery.
That enforcement is only set to decline further. In February last year, US President Donald Trump issued an executive order pausing enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act before the Justice Department unveiled new guidelines in June restricting prosecutions to cases directly threatening American economic competitiveness and national security.
“The Trump administration has reduced usage [of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act] to promote the ‘competitiveness’ of American companies,” Mitchell said.
“In contrast, Beijing is continually making its own anti-corruption framework more strict and far-reaching. The draft law indicates that this process of increasingly tight regulation continues to be a major focus for the party.”
Provisions such as Article 17, which establishes rewards and legal protections for whistle-blowers, were key legislative tools aimed at bolstering enforcement capabilities, Mitchell said.

One of the major features of China’s draft law is its power to fight foreign scrutiny and retaliate against overseas enforcement.
Erie said the draft was “a confluence of two reform trajectories: domestic anti-corruption concerns and foreign adversarialism”.
In particular, Article 6 was a reaction to perceived “unlawful US extraterritoriality”. The article authorises retaliatory and blocking measures if foreign states use anti-corruption enforcement “as a pretext” or improperly apply extraterritorial laws to suppress Chinese interests.
Article 26 also targets sovereignty, banning foreign entities and individuals from conducting anti-corruption investigations or gathering evidence within China without explicit state approval. And Chinese domestic entities cannot help foreign authorities without prior clearance.
Wang said Article 26 was “particularly important” because it was “a strong assertion that cross-border investigations must proceed through authorised government channels”.
If enacted, the law’s broad reach will be tested in key financial and trading hubs across Asia, such as Singapore, which hosts regional management, treasury functions, intermediaries, and holding structures for many Chinese enterprises.
Because cross-border investigations often involve offshore bank accounts, corporate structures, trusts and professional intermediaries, Chinese enforcement efforts will frequently require data and assets located within Singapore.
Wang said there was a “solid foundation” for bilateral cooperation, as both nations were signatories to the UN Convention Against Corruption and maintained formal channels for legal assistance and information sharing.
But it may not be automatic or unilateral.
Wang said that any requests from Beijing would have to navigate Singapore’s independent judicial process, where local authorities – such as the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau and the Attorney-General’s Chambers – process inquiries strictly according to Singaporean domestic law, evidential thresholds and procedural due process.
This raises three potential points of friction.
“The first is data disclosure, particularly where a company faces a Chinese demand to cooperate but is also subject to Singaporean confidentiality, privacy or regulatory obligations,” he said.
“The second is asset restraint, because Singaporean authorities or courts would need an adequate domestic legal basis before freezing or confiscating property.
“The third is competing investigations, especially where China and Singapore characterise the same transaction differently or both wish to prosecute.”
The broad scope of the law has also raised concerns over definitions of certain behaviour.
Bing Ling, a professor of Chinese law at the University of Sydney law school, warned that the text lacked statutory definitions of core terms in Article 3 such as “power rent-seeking” and “waste of state assets”.
“In practice, these concepts will likely derive their meaning from Chinese criminal law and internal disciplinary practice rather than internationally recognised standards, creating significant uncertainty for foreign firms dealing with Chinese SOEs,” he said.
Another area of ambiguity is Article 18, which authorises Chinese authorities to demand evidence and require foreign corporate cooperation in major cases based on “reciprocity”.
Ling said the draft did not define “cooperation” or how reciprocity operated in practice.
While international law prohibits unilateral enforcement on foreign soil without state consent, the provision’s open-ended language fuels concerns that Chinese enforcers might seek evidence outside formal channels.
For foreign multinationals, parallel-enforcement risk could increase significantly where a China connection exists
Will Wu, Chance Bridge Law Firm
For businesses, the draft law transforms internal compliance from a voluntary corporate safeguard into an independently enforceable statutory obligation.
According to Will Wu, a Shanghai-based partner at Chance Bridge Law Firm, the draft law reshapes cross-border risk for both foreign and Chinese entities in distinct ways.
“For foreign multinationals, parallel-enforcement risk could increase significantly where a China connection exists,” he said.
Under Articles 29 to 34, all enterprises engaged in cross-border operations – including domestic firms operating abroad and foreign multinational corporations operating within China – are legally required to establish “integrity compliance” management systems.
Wu said multinationals must evaluate China-related risks from the start and align their evidence handling, legal privilege, disclosures and remediation strategies across all involved jurisdictions.
For overseas Chinese enterprises, compliance duties would become far more direct and stringent, he added.
Article 33 spells out third-party due diligence, while Article 45 makes compliance failures an independently punishable administrative offence.
Companies failing to rectify control flaws would face business suspensions or licence revocations, even without proof of an actual bribe.
And while a parent company would not be automatically liable for an offshore agent’s misconduct, weak third-party oversight could trigger direct penalties and, together with other evidence, help legally link the company to suspected bribery involving that third party.
Additionally, offshore proxies or nominees used to transfer or hold illicit funds linked to suspected corruption across borders would fall directly under the law’s asset-tracing, restraint and recovery provisions, Wu added.


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China’s top legislature is debating the draft Anti-Cross-Border Corruption Law. Photo: Xinhua

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Beijing’s draft legislation looks like its US precedent but with some far-reaching differences, analysts say


Beijing’s draft legislation looks like its US precedent but with some far-reaching differences, analysts say.


China’s anti-corruption law is going global. What does it mean for overseas firms?

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Beijing’s draft legislation looks like its US precedent but with some far-reaching differences, analysts say

Beijing’s draft legislation looks like its US precedent but with some far-reaching differences, analysts say