About China Law Blog

China Law Blog

The China Law Blog is a long-running English-language online publication on Chinese business law, started in January 2006 by the international law firm Harris Sliwoski LLP — formerly Harris Bricken, and earlier Harris & Moure — and principally written by the firm's founding member Dan Harris. It publishes practical, attorney-written analysis for foreign companies doing business in or with China: foreign investment and wholly foreign-owned enterprise (WFOE) formation, manufacturing and distribution contracts, trademark and intellectual property protection, China employment law, Sinosure claims and cross-border dispute resolution. Although its subject is China and the firm historically maintained a Beijing presence, the blog's actual base is the United States — Harris Sliwoski's offices include Seattle and other US cities — and Beijing is recorded here as the rollout's nominal city for foreign-based, China-focused outlets. The blog remains active, with Harris Sliwoski confirming in 2025–2026 updates to its archive and new China posts continuing into 2026.

Founded in January 2006

The blog's own retrospective is precise about its birthday: “My law firm started this blog in January, 2006, and we were representing foreign companies in China and the rest of Asia long before that.” Dan Harris, in an interview with Newstex, explained how unlikely the start was: “We started in 2006, and a good friend of mine had read about blogging. He spent about an hour convincing me that blogging would be the future for law firms like mine.” In an earlier interview with Attorney at Work, Harris gave the original purpose in one sentence: “To let the world know that we were out there with lawyers in the United States and in China and handling China legal matters every single day.” At the time of that interview the firm was the 17-lawyer Seattle firm Harris & Moure PLLC, based in Seattle with lawyers in Beijing, Chicago and Qingdao, publishing at chinalawblog.com; the blog has since moved with the firm to harris-sliwoski.com/chinalawblog, where its archive now runs to well over a hundred index pages of posts.

Longevity is the blog's first distinction. Legal blogging was in its infancy in 2006, and a firm blog devoted entirely to the law of doing business in China — maintained continuously for two decades, through the US-China trade war, China's new Foreign Investment Law, the pandemic era and the current period of heightened cross-border scrutiny — became a running primary record of how China's commercial legal environment looked, year by year, to the foreign companies operating inside it.

Dan Harris and the firm's China practice

Dan Harris is the blog's founder and principal writer — “your baby is the China Law Blog, right?” his Newstex interviewer asked, and Harris agreed — and he remains its public voice. He describes his own practice simply: “I'm an international lawyer, and for the last 20-plus years, I have mostly been helping American and European companies navigate China.” Publisher and firm biographies describe him as an international lawyer widely recognised as a leading expert on legal issues related to conducting business in emerging markets, frequently sought for his insights by major media outlets such as Forbes, Business Week and the BBC, and a prolific writer and speaker on international law known particularly for safeguarding businesses involved with foreign operations. For much of the blog's history his co-author was Steve Dickinson, a fellow Harris & Moure lawyer; an Attorney at Work profile introduced the site as “the China Law Blog, co-authored by Dan Harris and Steve Dickinson,” with both lawyers writing from the firm's day-to-day China casework.

That grounding in live client work is the blog's editorial method. Its posts are not summaries of Chinese statutes produced at a distance; they are written by the attorneys who form the companies, draft the contracts, register the trademarks and handle the disputes the posts describe, and they habitually draw lessons from matters the firm has just handled — a factory holding a client's tooling hostage, an employer discovering what Chinese labour law actually requires, a brand owner finding its mark already registered by someone else in China.

Recognition: the ABA Blawg Hall of Fame

The blog's standing in legal publishing was recognised early and formally. The American Bar Association Journal named the China Law Blog to its Blawg Hall of Fame — a designation, Attorney at Work noted, “so far given to only 20 law blogs” at the time — after previously honouring it among the leading law blogs in its annual Blawg 100 coverage. Harris Sliwoski's own publisher profile likewise calls it “celebrated as one of the premier law blogs globally.” Independent descriptions agree on its reach: a 2025 guide to verifying the genuine blog — prompted by fake “CNLawBlog” imitation sites trading on its name — described it as “one of the most widely read resources on Chinese business law, intellectual property, and cross-border dispute resolution,” noted that “CNLawBlog stands for China Law Blog” and that it “was founded by Dan Harris and the attorneys at Harris Sliwoski LLP (formerly Harris Bricken), an international law firm focused on China-related legal work,” and advised readers that the only official home is harris-sliwoski.com, with articles listing named, licensed attorneys. Imitation, in this case, is measurable evidence of authority: the blog's name had become valuable enough to counterfeit.

Foreign investment and forming a China entity

The blog's most characteristic subject is the first decision every foreign business in China faces: what legal presence to establish, and on what terms. Its archive returns constantly to wholly foreign-owned enterprises — posts such as “Forming a China WFOE: Scope is Key” and “Forming a China Subsidiary: Needed or Not” work through how a WFOE's approved business scope constrains what it may lawfully do, when a subsidiary is required, and what structures are available instead. A signature post, “Doing Business in China Without a WFOE: Will the Defendant Please Rise,” states a thesis the blog has repeated since its inception: “if you are doing business in China you need a Chinese legal entity, be it a Wholly Foreign Owned Entity (WFOE), a Joint Venture (JV) or a Representative Office (RO)” — and warns, in deliberately alarmist terms, of the personal and commercial exposure that follows from operating without one. When China adopted its new Foreign Investment Law, the blog covered it in characteristically sceptical depth, including “China's New Foreign Investment Law Benefits: Like Putting Lipstick on a Pig,” questioning how much the reform would change conditions for foreign investors in practice.

Contracts, manufacturing and getting paid

A second core strand is the law of making things in China and getting paid for them: manufacturing agreements, distribution contracts, product quality disputes and the mechanics of enforcing a bargain against a Chinese counterparty. Years of posts distil the firm's manufacturing practice into recurring rules — put the agreement in writing and in Chinese, specify quality standards and remedies, protect tooling and moulds, and structure payment so that leverage does not evaporate when goods ship. The blog has covered Sinosure — China's export-credit insurance system — and the claims foreign buyers and sellers can pursue under it, alongside cross-border dispute resolution generally: where to sue or arbitrate, what a judgment or award is worth, and why the contract's dispute-resolution clause, negotiated before anything goes wrong, usually decides the outcome. Its trade-war era writing, such as “The US-China Trade War: Winter is Coming” and “The US-China Cold War Starts Now: What You Must do to Prepare,” applied the same practical lens to tariffs and decoupling, translating geopolitical escalation into concrete steps for companies with factories, suppliers and contracts on the ground.

Trademarks and intellectual property protection

No theme has recurred more often, or with more exasperated energy, than intellectual property registration. “When we first started this blog back in 2006,” one representative post recalls, “we would constantly write how if you want to protect your IP in China, you have to register your IP in China. Our thesis was (and is) that if you don't bother registering your IP in China, you really have no right to complain about” losing it. The point reflects China's first-to-file trademark system, under which rights generally belong to whoever registers first — a system that has repeatedly caught foreign brand owners whose manufacturers, distributors or unrelated parties registered their marks first. Posts such as “China Trademark Theft: It's Baaaaaack in a Big Way” track the waves of the problem: “Everything China comes in waves and China trademark ‘theft’ is no different. When we first started this blog back in 2006, we would get a call just about every week from someone wanting to sue a Chinese company blocking the company's product from leaving China.” The blog's standing advice — register trademarks in China early, in the right classes, before entering the market or even exhibiting — has been quoted and repeated across the China business community for two decades.

Employment law and operating in China

Employing people in China is the third pillar of the archive. The blog's employment-law posts address the realities that surprise foreign employers: written labour contracts are effectively mandatory, termination is far more restricted than in the United States, severance and social insurance obligations are structural rather than optional, and employee handbooks and company rules only bind staff if adopted through the procedures Chinese law requires. These posts share the blog's house style — concrete scenarios drawn from client matters, the governing Chinese rule stated plainly, and the cost of discovering the rule too late made vivid. For foreign managers and founders, the employment archive functions as an informal handbook to the single area of Chinese law they will encounter every day they operate, more often than investment approvals or litigation.

Style, voice and editorial stance

The China Law Blog does not write like a law review, and its voice is a large part of its influence. Headlines are blunt and sometimes gleeful — lipstick on a pig, trademark theft returning “in a big way,” winter coming for the trade war — and the prose is first-person, opinionated and deliberately plain, translating Chinese legal concepts for business readers rather than lawyers alone. Its stance is consistently that of the foreign company's advocate hardened by experience: enthusiastic about China business done properly, scathing about shortcuts, unregistered rights, handshake deals and official promises that outrun enforcement. That voice also makes the archive a document of sentiment: read in sequence, its posts chart twenty years of foreign business mood on China, from the expansiveness of 2006 through trade-war alarm in 2019 to the risk-management tone of its recent updates, many of which are still maintained — archive pages show older posts being modified and refreshed as recently as 2025.

Place among China law resources

Within English-language resources on Chinese law, the China Law Blog occupies the practitioner's chair. Academic journals analyse Chinese law as a system; newswires report its changes as events; the China Law Blog has, since 2006, explained it as a set of decisions facing a named company on a specific Monday morning — form the WFOE or not, register the mark now or lose it, sign this contract clause or that one. Its ABA Blawg Hall of Fame membership, its two decades of continuous publication, its readership among the foreign business community and even the existence of counterfeit sites borrowing its name together mark it as the best-known law-firm blog ever devoted to China. Under Harris Sliwoski, it now sits alongside the firm's other practice blogs while remaining, in its founder's words and its publisher's description, his “baby” and one of the premier law blogs in the world.

Access and official website

The China Law Blog is published openly on the Harris Sliwoski LLP website at harris-sliwoski.com/chinalawblog, where readers can browse its full archive by category — including China business and foreign investment — search two decades of posts, and follow its current China coverage. Readers verifying authenticity should use that address directly and look for posts signed by the firm's named attorneys, as the firm itself advises against imitation sites using similar names.