About China Justice Observer

China Justice Observer

China Justice Observer (CJO) is an English-language online publication dedicated to presenting China's judiciary and legal system to a global audience. Published at chinajusticeobserver.com, it explains what is happening in Chinese courts and why it is happening, helping readers who must settle disputes in China to build reasonable expectations and develop effective strategies, and helping those simply intrigued by Chinese justice to explore the field. Its coverage spans laws, regulations, policies and cases, with particular depth on the Supreme People's Court, judicial interpretations, and the cross-border questions — above all the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments in China — that matter most to foreign businesses, lawyers and litigants. Written entirely in English by Chinese legal professionals and scholars, CJO has become one of the most substantial English-language windows onto the working of Chinese justice.

Mission and approach

CJO states its purpose plainly on its About page: it is committed to presenting the Chinese judicial system. For readers facing dispute resolution in China, it aims to help them build reasonable expectations and develop effective strategies and solutions; for readers intrigued by China's justice, it helps them explore a fascinating field. Its method is explanatory as well as reportorial. It does not merely note that a mechanism has been established; it reconstructs the debates among Chinese legislators, judges, prosecutors, lawyers, scholars and the public that preceded it, then follows how the mechanism works in practice after creation and what public views of it are. The site says it presents the logic of China's justice — its transparency and openness as well as its humanised part — so that readers confronting the Chinese judicial system are not left feeling at a loss or overwhelmed. That pedagogical mission shapes everything it publishes, from one-minute explainers to long research lists built up case by case over years.

Founders: Guodong Du and Meng Yu

China Justice Observer is co-founded by Guodong Du and Meng Yu, two specialists in cross-border dispute resolution. Guodong Du is a practising lawyer, currently at Beijing Anli Law Firm, having previously practised for years at the Beijing office of Dentons, the global law firm. Meng Yu is the site's other founder and its most prolific contributor, credited with more than 540 articles on the site. She is a lecturer in private international law at the China University of Political Science and Law (CUPL), where she received her Ph.D. in law in the field of the judicial system; as a postdoctoral fellow she led a project on proof of foreign law in Chinese courts, and she was also a visiting scholar at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. Meng and her team of lawyers focus on the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments in China, the subject that has become CJO's signature research programme. Friends of the founders within China's legal profession also contribute to the site, and CJO invites submissions in English or Chinese from would-be contributors and translators, building an engaged community around introducing the Chinese legal system in English.

Institutional backing and partnerships

CJO is sponsored by the Academy of Comprehensive Rule of Law at the China University of Political Science and Law, one of China's leading law universities, and works in partnership with Qidu Legal Translation and Yuanhe Partners. This institutional setting distinguishes it from a purely commercial legal blog: it sits at the intersection of legal practice, legal academia and legal translation, the three crafts its content requires. Explaining Chinese judgments and judicial interpretations to foreign readers demands precise legal translation as much as legal knowledge, and the partnership with a specialist translation provider reflects that need. The site is published in English as its authoritative language; versions in other languages are automatically generated by Google Translate, and CJO states that in case of any discrepancy the English version prevails — a rule that underlines how seriously it treats the accuracy of its English rendering of Chinese legal materials.

China Legal Trends: the daily column

The site's news engine is China Legal Trends, a column updated daily that provides up-to-the-minute comments on China's laws, regulations, policies and cases, together with in-depth analyses of major events relating to Chinese law and insights drawn from public documents. Through China Legal Trends, CJO tracks the steady output of the Supreme People's Court (SPC) and other authorities: new judicial interpretations, batches of typical cases and guiding cases, and policy documents across fields from civil and commercial law to criminal justice, intellectual property, labour, environment and cyberspace governance. Recent coverage in this stream has included the SPC's typical cases on estate administrators under the Civil Code, its judicial interpretations on marriage law and on tort liability, typical cases on personal data leaks and cybercrime, prepaid consumption disputes, online consumption and live-stream marketing, environmental trials, protection of minors, artificial intelligence and intellectual property, and telecom fraud. For a foreign reader, this daily digest performs an important function: Chinese judicial policy is often signalled through exactly these typical cases and interpretations, and CJO renders them promptly in summarised English.

Insights and longer analysis

Alongside the daily news column, CJO's Insights section publishes longer analytical pieces by its founders and contributors. Insights articles take up questions that a news summary cannot answer: how Chinese courts should retrieve and apply similar cases under the Supreme Court's guiding opinions, how the SPC reports its work — and that of local courts nationwide — to the National People's Congress, how personal information collection was judged in China's first facial recognition case, Guo v. Hangzhou Safari Park, and how foreign courts have treated Chinese judgments abroad. Meng Yu's Insights writing in particular develops the site's cross-border expertise, for example clarifying in 2026, through Australian case law including Zhengzhou Lvdu Real Estate Group Co v Shu and Fu v Pang, that the double-interest mechanism in Chinese monetary judgments functions as a compensatory post-judgment interest framework rather than an unenforceable penalty — the kind of doctrinal detail that determines whether a Chinese judgment can actually be enforced overseas. The section also carries the CTD 101 series and explainers such as China Law in One Minute, which compress single legal concepts into short, accessible briefings for non-specialist readers.

The foreign judgments case list

CJO's best-known research product is its List of China's Cases on Recognition of Foreign Judgments, a running, freely published database maintained by Meng Yu and her team. The team endeavours to collect all Chinese court decisions involving the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments, and foreign counterparts concerning the recognition and enforcement of Chinese judgments, so that readers can build reasonable expectations about recognition and enforcement in China. The list is updated in successive annual versions. The 2024 version, released on 22 September 2024, had collected 109 cases involving China and 26 foreign states and regions; the 2025 version, released on 31 December 2025, reached 120 cases involving 26 foreign states and regions, excluding foreign divorce judgments. The list comprises concise reports for each jurisdiction, together with a chart of the bilateral judicial assistance treaties China has concluded with 39 states, of which 35 include judgment enforcement clauses. It distinguishes treaty jurisdictions such as Italy, France, Turkey and Russia from non-treaty jurisdictions such as the United States, Germany, Singapore and South Korea, where recognition turns on reciprocity, and it records individual milestones — for instance the Shanghai International Commercial Court's recognition and enforcement in January 2025 of a Singapore High Court monetary judgment, and the first New South Wales enforcement of a Chinese monetary judgment in Bao v Qu; Tian in 2020.

The Civil Code reference project

A second major reference contribution is CJO's free English material on China's Civil Code. China promulgated its first-ever Civil Code in May 2020 — adopted on 28 May 2020 and effective from 1 January 2021 — comprising seven parts: General Principles, Real Rights, Contracts, Personality Rights, Marriage and Family, Succession, Liability for Tort, plus Supplementary Provisions. CJO publishes a free English version of the Code book by book for global readers, alongside a PRC Civil Code series explaining each part, and continuing coverage of the Supreme People's Court's supporting judicial interpretations, which have addressed the guarantee system, contract law, marriage and family matters and tort liability, among others. It has followed the Code in practice from the first case pronounced under it, in the Shanghai Financial Court in January 2021, through typical cases on the estate administrator system years later, and has explained signature innovations such as the divorce cooling-off period the Code introduced and its treatment of workplace sexual harassment. For foreign lawyers and businesses, this free, organised English reference to China's foundational private-law statute is a practical resource that complements the site's news coverage.

Arbitration and cross-border dispute resolution

Cross-border dispute resolution beyond court judgments forms another sustained strand of coverage. CJO reports on arbitration in and concerning China, including the recognition and enforcement of foreign arbitral awards — it has tracked Chinese court decisions on awards of bodies such as the International Centre for Dispute Resolution of the American Arbitration Association — and on institutional developments such as the China Commission of Arbitration for Sports releasing its first typical cases, and China's designation of the Beijing No. 4 Intermediate People's Court to handle recognition and enforcement of ICSID awards. Its founders' practice background informs practical guidance threaded through the site: readers who need legal services for the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments and arbitral awards in China are directed to Guodong Du and his team, while those seeking the full text of decisions or wishing to discuss a post are directed to Meng Yu. Coverage of Hong Kong-related developments — such as mainland-Hong Kong arrangements illustrated by typical cases from the Guangdong High People's Court on recognising a mainland-appointed bankruptcy administrator — reflects the Greater Bay Area's importance in cross-border practice.

Audience and significance

CJO addresses several overlapping audiences: foreign and Chinese lawyers handling China-related disputes; businesses assessing litigation and enforcement risk in China; academics and students of Chinese and comparative law; and general readers seeking to understand how Chinese courts actually operate. Its significance lies in the scarcity of what it provides. Chinese judicial information is abundant in Chinese but fragmented, technical and difficult for outsiders to interpret; sustained English-language explanation by insiders — a CUPL scholar and a Beijing practitioner, backed by a law academy — is rare. By combining a daily news digest, analytical essays, a unique case database on foreign judgment recognition and a free English Civil Code, China Justice Observer functions simultaneously as a news outlet, a research platform and a practical guide. Within the WorldNM directory it stands as a leading example of specialist legal online news from China: narrow in subject, deep in expertise, and built to make a complex judicial system legible to the world.