China Laws Portal (“CLP”) is an English database of Chinese law, aiming to make Chinese law transparent and accessible by providing people around the world with Chinese laws and other legal documents in English.

There are three types of documents in CLP:

1. Laws and regulations: including laws, regulations, judicial interpretations, and local rules.

2. Documents: including white papers, reports, speeches, essays, etc.

3. Cases: including judgments and rulings from courts.

For the legal documents with official English version from the Chinese government, we will provide you with full text in both Chinese and English for free.

For other documents, we will provide you with free Chinese texts and paid-for English translations. Or you can translate it with tools or in other ways as you please.

In order to help you quickly decide if the document meets your needs, free English summaries for every document prepared by our expert team are available on CLP.

We understand that it is difficult to search effectively for things you want if you haven’t learned Chinese law. For your convenience, we have provided you with the Toolkit.

The Toolkit is a series of articles prepared by us and continuously updated, with the function as a “map” to guide you in researching and localizing. Each article is a brief legal research memo, which lists all relevant laws and documents under a certain topic or in a specific scenario.

And if the Toolkit cannot meet your needs, we can also provide you with a tailored legal research report. For more on tailored services, please contact Meng Yu via e-mail at meng.yu@chinajusticeobserver.com.

Our story 

We (Guodong Du, Meng Yu and our team members) set up China Justice Observer (“CJO”) in Mar. 2018. CLP is our second project, which has been running since Sept. 2020.

The two projects are designed for two different purposes.

CJO is a legal media, trying to tell you how Chinese law works.

CLP is a commercial legal database, trying to tell you what Chinese law is.

The reason we give birth to CJO and CLP is that we find there are very few contents about Chinese laws in English on the Internet, and the things about how Chinese laws are being enforced are even fewer. We believe that it is not only beneficial to the world, but also to China, to make Chinese laws more transparent to the world, and to help the world set up a reasonable expectation of China.

In the legal area, we need to bridge the information gap between China and the people around the world. Our team wants to take over this job, because we are keen on observing and understanding different cultures.

We love to travel around the world. During the journeys, we like to look for the differences between different cultures, and we try to understand the differences while searching for the reasons behind these differences by talking with local people. We will also talk about things that are different in China and we will try to explain the logic and reality of the difference.

We love this so much that we try to set up a platform for communicating and understanding between different cultures in the law area, which we are specialized in.

For this purpose, we have built up CJO, a blog with multiple contributors, which concentrates on introducing China’s judicial system, in other words: how the Chinese law works.

Later on, we find that although there are some Chinese legal materials in English available on the Internet, they are far from enough and too out of date. It is hard for us to provide necessary references for the readers to better understand the articles on CJO.
Considering this, we are now trying to set up CLP, the English database of Chinese laws, to introduce “what the Chinese law is”.

It is ambitious for us to make this our career. We will start low, go slow, but look far. 

For now, CLP covers the following three kinds of things:

a. laws that are stipulated by China’s highest legislative body: National People’s Congress and its Standing Committee;

b. all laws, regulations, judicial interpretations, legal documents and important judgments in the intellectual property area;

c. all laws, regulations, judicial interpretations, legal documents and important judgments in Internet and science and technology area.

We will gradually expand the coverage according to your needs.

As always, your requirement and suggestion are the most welcome.

All content of CLP is written in English, and content in other languages is automatically generated by Google Translate. In case of any discrepancy between the English version and the version in other languages, the English version shall prevail.