China Business Law Journal – September 2025

Shaken, not stirred

China boasts the world’s largest gig economy, with roughly 200 million gig workers. This may not be so surprising – it probably sounds fairly on-brand considering the population base, but few outside the country truly grasp the impact it has on people’s mentality and everyday life.

24/7 instant food delivery is the expected norm rather than anything special. Ride-hailing is a regular mode of travel even among car owners, and for almost every generation of China’s massive workforce, joining the ever growing squads of Meituan deliverers and Didi drivers is a serious career consideration. This gives leading platforms an enormous amount of leverage over the market players, making any misstep or overstep all the more devastating.

Efforts are being made to curb risks of imbalance. Our cover story, No more wild west, dives into the recent overhaul of China’s Anti-Unfair Competition Law, set to take effect in October, which aims to facilitate “orderly development” of the juggernaut platforms by clearly defining and expanding their duties, making them essentially “gatekeepers” of their dominated ecosystems and ushering in an era of “fair competition”.

For companies to maintain their competitiveness, one of the most prominent lines of defence is the confidentiality clause incorporated into contracts or separate confidentiality agreements. Without this mechanism in place, corporations risk losing the value of their most closely guarded trade secrets.

However, if poorly designed, confidentiality agreements may do harm rather than good. In Guarding your secrets, Xu Yehong, a legal director at Nuctech, identifies key issues in such agreements that in-house counsel must keep an eye out for.

The dispute field in China is becoming difficult to keep up with, not that resolution was ever easy. The long awaited resurgence in capital markets, the pressing needs for debt recovery, and the emerging sectors driven by innovative technologies continue to introduce sophisticated dispute issues that require both legal and business expertise.

In Research, recalibrate, repeat, senior partners with decades of experience in dispute resolution examine the key trends rewriting the rules today, as well as the best course of action for businesses going forward.

Last but not least, we proudly unveil the winners of the China Business Law Awards (Regional Awards) 2025, which celebrate the past year’s legal excellence across the nation.

This year, we have witnessed a gradual breakdown in the traditional boundaries between the roles of nationwide law firms and local players, as markets beyond first-tier cities thrive. We offer a hearty congratulations to all the winning law firms.