A lunchtime seminar will be delivered by the visiting scholar, Ding Jun Toh, a PhD candidate at SMU Law, to discuss the logic and limits of Chinese Bankruptcy Law.

To an outsider, corporate bankruptcy law in China appears to be a case of many paradoxes. On one hand, the law as written envisions the bankruptcy decision to be placed in the hands of the market. On the other hand, the legislative structure of the Enterprise Bankruptcy Law 2006 implicitly encourages the use of restructuring over liquidation. In practice, a similar paradox is observed. While the Chinese central government has urged its officials on many occasions to deal with bankrupt companies pursuant to the law, there remains a practice amongst local authorities to intervene – pre-emptively or otherwise – in cases of corporate distress, regardless of whether such cases are financially systemic threats or otherwise. This paper seeks to uncover plausible reasons for such observations. In this regard, it makes a novel argument that Chinese corporate bankruptcy law, properly understood, fundamentally has to deal with a triangularisation of the hitherto linear debtor-creditor relationship that is formed when the corporate debtor was a going concern. Such a triangular relationship, of the state, debtor, and creditor, is likely only possible in China, due to its unique commercial environment – a consideration that appears poorly understood in the current academic literature on China and its corporate bankruptcy laws.

About the Speaker:

Ding Jun is a first year PhD Candidate at the Yong Pung How School of Law, Singapore Management University. He is an Advocate and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Singapore and is currently a Research Assistant at the Singapore Global Restructuring Initiative. His research areas are in corporate law and corporate insolvency law.

If you require accessibility accommodations or a Visitor Personal Emergency Evacuation Plan please contact the event organiser.