Highlights and Issues Concerning the Amendment of China’s Antimonopoly Law

The first amendment to the Anti-Monopoly Law of the PRC came into effect in August 2022 since it was promulgated in 2007. From a macro perspective, this amendment emphasizes the fundamental status of competition policy in the various national economic policies and introduces fair competition review system; while in terms of micro aspects, it strengthens anti-monopoly enforcement in the digital economy, introduces ‘safe harbor’ rule for some vertical agreements, and enhances legal deterrence for anticompetitive violations. Nevertheless, the revised AML contains some issues worth further discussion and improvement, in particular it should not only recruit new contents, but also scrap some outdated provisions with theoretical or practical defects.

By Xiaoye Wang^[1]

On June 24, 2022, the 35th meeting of the Standing Committee of the 13th National People’s Congress adopted the Draft Anti-Monopoly Law (Amendment), which came into effect in August 2022. The new Anti-Monopoly Law has 70 articles in 8 chapters, with 13 new articles added and 23 articles modified from the past. Parts I to IV of this paper review the highlights of this amendment, Part V discusses several important issues that should have been considered during the amendment, and the conclusion comes at the end of this paper.

I. STRENGTHEN THE BASIC POSITION OF COMPETITION POLICY

The biggest highlight of the amendment of the Antimonopoly Law is the addition of the expression “