China should bring in judges from overseas and expand arbitration pilot programmes to extend the international reach of its legal system, according to a former senior justice official.
Xiong Xuanguo, who was vice-minister of justice from 2016 to 2023, said China’s legal system was not integrated with others around the world, making it difficult for the country to enforce its court judgments abroad.
To tackle the problem, China should train its arbitrators to meet global standards and also hire experienced foreign arbitrators, said Xiong, now a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the country’s top political advisory body.
“We should enlist some well-recognised international arbitrators and mediators to guide arbitration and mediation institutions as they go global, to make our arbitration bodies more visible and to compete fairly abroad,” he told the South China Morning Post on Thursday afternoon on the sidelines of the “two sessions” in Beijing.
During a social sciences sector panel discussion, Xiong also said that areas such as Shanghai, Guangdong province and Hong Kong should forge links with internationally influential commercial mediation bodies, and encourage more places across China to set up pilot international commercial arbitration centres.
China’s push to expand the overseas reach of its law is part of its proposed five-year plan that will run until 2030 and is expected to be endorsed at the end of the two sessions.
The draft of the plan released last week calls for the government to establish an “overseas security protection framework” to fend off sanctions, interference and “long-arm jurisdiction” by other countries.
It also calls for deeper international cooperation in law enforcement and security as well as improvements to the country’s international commercial mediation, arbitration and litigation mechanisms.
To this end, the Hong Kong-based International Organisation for Mediation (IOMed) should play a “more substantial role”, the draft says.
Hong Kong ranked joint first with Singapore in the Asia-Pacific region and joint second, after London, as the most preferred seat of arbitration worldwide, according to the 2025 International Arbitration Survey conducted by Queen Mary University of London in April last year.
The urgency of this task is underscored by a surge in international disputes involving Chinese interests over the past few years.
Delivering his annual work report on Monday, Supreme People’s Court president Zhang Jun said the court system had dealt with 159,000 “foreign-related cases” in the past five years.
That amounted to a two-thirds rise in such cases compared to the previous five years, with big increases in intellectual property and maritime disputes, he said.
On Thursday, however, Xiong noted that China still lagged behind international legal hubs such as Singapore, where arbitration, mediation and courts worked in harmony.
“Our mediation agreements and court judgments often fail to gain effective recognition or enforcement overseas,” Xiong said, stressing the need for a seamless “toolkit” that aligned with international standards.
IOMed, launched in Hong Kong in May, is a central element of China’s strategy.
Framed by Beijing as a public good for the Global South, IOMed aims to “fill an institutional gap” in global governance.
But Xiong cautioned that the organisation was still in its infancy and needed time to prove its effectiveness. -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
